Study shows improvement in teachers’ assessment skills after workshop

The Australian Council for Educational Research (India), in partnership with the Delhi Board of School Education (DBSE), is working towards transforming the school assessment landscape in the Indian educational system.

As part of the broader goal of assessment system transformation, ACER India organised a 5-day professional development workshop on competency-based assessment for 70 teachers from DBSE affiliated schools in New Delhi.

The workshop was aimed at providing an understanding of competency-based learning systems and basic knowledge and skills to develop competency-based assessment items and tasks based on the DBSE criteria-based assessment framework. The framework is aligned with the National Education Policy, 2020.

A structured pre- and post- workshop assessment

In addition to delivering the workshop, we were interested in gauging the effectiveness of the initiative through a data-driven approach. We developed an assessment for participants comprising 15 questions that focused on 3 sections:

• DBSE structure (facts about DBSE, schools associated with it and specialisations offered in them)
• competency assessment (competency-based assessments conducted in DBSE)
• competency reporting (competencies as reported in DBSE).

The assessment included 10 multiple-choice questions and 5 constructed-response questions. Participants took the assessments both before the workshop (on Day 1) and afterwards (on Day 5), providing a clear measure of the programme's impact on their competency levels.

The analysis of the assessments revealed a compelling narrative of progress, illustrating a remarkable journey where participants significantly enhanced their understanding and application of competency-based assessment techniques.

The boxplot shows a significant increase in participants’ average scores from the pre-workshop to the post-workshop test. The enhancement of competency-based assessment skills is evident by the rise in average scores of the participants from 6.28 to 8.19 out of 15. A detailed statistical analysis, using the Wilcoxon rank sum test, confirmed this increase is statistically significant, with a very low p-value of 0.0002139.

Our analyses suggest a genuine and meaningful improvement in teachers' competency levels after their participation in the teacher professional development initiative. It also validates the initiative's effectiveness in bolstering teaching standards relating to competency-based assessments.

With strong empirical evidence from the analysis and a significant rise in scores, the workshop met its objectives, highlighting the profound impact of targeted professional development on teaching excellence. However, engaging with teachers and observing the implementation of competency-based learning techniques in classroom settings is the recommended next step.