Competency-based assessment support

As education shifts its emphasis from "what to think" to "how to think", assessment has to shift with it: from evaluating knowledge to evaluating skills. What a child can recall tells us something. What a child can observe, reason about, apply and explain tells us whether learning has happened. We believe assessment should serve learning, and that a school should be able to see, by competency and by grade, where its children are.

Competency-based assessment support is our work with your teachers on assessment: we mentor them through the year, so that the questions they set test competencies and not only recall. Every curriculum-aligned module comes with an open-ended pondersheet for students, and we assist with the school's own formative and summative assessments. Four components carry this work: a competency-based question bank, question paper review, baseline and endline assessment, and Holistic Progress Card design. They are taken together or separately.

Every school assesses constantly, and the results are often reassuring. In our classrooms we have met many a child who scored 92 in the Science exam and, asked why droplets form on the outside of a cold glass, said the water leaked through. The child knew the word condensation and had used it in the exam. The exam simply did not ask anything that would have found this out.

Teachers who have taught these lessons with us say the same thing afterwards: they had expected evaporation and condensation to be easy chapters because the children already knew the terms. Competency-based assessment makes the difference between the term and the understanding visible, early enough to do something about it.

Assessment also shapes teaching. When a paper rewards recall, classrooms teach for recall; when it asks children to observe, compare, predict and explain, teachers make room for those things. So aligning assessments to aid constructivist pedagogy, and adapting curriculum activities to shift the focus on to skills, is part of every teachers' mentoring engagement we run. The National Education Policy asks for exactly this: assessment that is competency-based, tests higher-order skills and supports learning rather than only certifying it.

The four components build on each other. The question bank changes what teachers can draw on while planning. Paper review changes what the school's own tests measure. Baseline and endline assessment shows, by competency and by grade, what changed over the year. The progress card carries that picture to parents in a form they can read.

At the deepest level of engagement, competency-based assessment stops being a separate process and becomes part of your own formative and summative assessment and of ordinary classroom discussion.

What it is

A chapter-wise bank of questions mapped to your syllabus and to the competencies each chapter is meant to build. It gives teachers a ready supply of questions that ask children to apply, reason and explain, alongside the questions that check recall.

How it works

The bank sits inside the Nurture app, so a teacher draws on it while planning a chapter, not the night before a test. Teachers can pick from it for classwork, homework, pondersheets and tests. This is the easiest component to adopt, because it changes nothing about your existing cycle.

Putting it in place

The question bank is part of Learn2Learn. On its own, it is where most schools start, usually together with question paper review in the same year, because the review is where teachers see what their papers measure and the bank is what they then reach for.

What it is

We read the question papers your teachers have already written, and co-design the next set with them. Together we look at which questions test recall, which test application, and what the paper as a whole is measuring. This is usually the moment a school sees the gap for itself.

How it works

Papers come to us two to three weeks before the test. We return written feedback, question by question and on the paper as a whole, and sit with the teachers who set it. Over the year, teacher workshops on competency-based assessment design build the habit, so that teachers write the next paper with competencies in mind from the start.

Putting it in place

Question paper review is part of Learn2Learn; co-designed papers and assessment built into your own cycle come as the partnership deepens.

What it is

When a school's results are good but its children cannot apply what they know, the first thing we do is find out where the children are. Baseline and endline assessment is that diagnostic: the same student assessment at the start of the year and at the end, for the grades that adopt the program, reported by competency and by grade rather than as a single mark.

How it works

The baseline is sat in the first weeks of the year. It is built of competency-based questions, so a child who knows the term but not the idea is visible in the results. We report the picture to your leadership and teachers, and the year's mentoring and paper review work from it. At the end of the year the same assessment is sat again, and the two reports side by side show what moved. The same picture feeds impact tracking and review and the written end-of-year report.

Putting it in place

Baseline and endline usually runs on two grades first rather than the whole school, and grows with the grades that adopt the program. It is part of Learn2Learn from the first year, and the endline report is where the year's change is shown rather than described.

What it is

A progress card that reports what a child can do, in language a parent can read, and that fits your existing formative and summative cycle rather than running beside it. The card is where the shift from evaluating knowledge to evaluating skills reaches parents, and it is what lets the rest of the work hold when parents ask about it.

How it works

We work with your coordinators on the competencies to report, grade by grade, and on the language used to report them.

Putting it in place

Progress card design is part of Learn2Learn as the partnership deepens and assessment moves inside your own cycle. On its own it follows naturally once the question bank and paper review are in use, because a card can only report what the assessments measure.