A two-day workshop aimed at equipping Vice Principals and Assessment Officers of Colleges of Education (COE) with some special knowledge and skills on best practices in assessment is taking place at the University. Organised by the Institute of Education, the workshop, which is intended to be a training of trainers, is being held on the theme “Improving Pre-Service Teachers’ Learning through Formative Assessment”. Opening the workshop, the Director of the Institute, Prof. Frederick Ocansey, said the Institute was responsible for curriculum development, curriculum assessment (CA) and innovation for students of the Colleges of Education nationwide. According to him, the Institute works in tandem with Vice Principals and Assessment Officers regarding the organisation of examination and the setting of standard examination questions. The workshop, he explained, was to review, critique and suggest improvement in the process and procedures used in the conduct of end -of- semester examinations for enhanced future performance. He recounted that from 1975, the Institute had been assessing students of the Colleges of Education and it had thus become a force to reckon with regarding assessing students in the two levels of examination: continuous assessment and end-of –semester examination. Prof. Ocansey said the workshop would also afford participants the opportunity to brainstorm and devise strategies to stamp out illicit ways students adopt to cheat during examination. In his presentation on the topic “Formative Assessment in the COE”, a professor in Educational Measurement and Statistics, Francis Kodzo Amedahe, explained that Formative Assessment helps students to improve upon their learning. He noted that sometimes when instructors teach in classrooms, at the end of their lectures, students may not fully understand the lessons taught as a result of some misconceptions or deficiencies. Prof. Amedahe, therefore, stressed that it was through formative assessment that an instructor(s) would know the performance – good or bad – of students as regards their level of understanding of lessons taught in the classroom. “And therefore it is important to emphasize formative assessment by teachers to help students improve their learning and the effective way of improving formative assessment is pointing out the deficiencies specifically to individual students about what they can do, what they have not done and what they can correct,” he continued. He took participants through summative assessment, which he explained among other things as getting the overview of what the students had learnt during the period of lessons. Participants were advised to share the knowledge and experience they learn from the workshop with their colleagues.
