By Magnus Emuji
Delta State Government has reaffirmed its avowed commitment toward generating credible and valid test items for the 2022 Cognitive/Placement and Basic Education Certificate Examinations that would adhere to the outlined provision in the school curriculum.
The Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education in the state, Mr Augustine Oghoro, gave the assurance while declaring open a workshop on the generation of test items for the 2022 Cognitive/ Placement and Basic Education Certificate Examinations in Asaba.
Oghoro said that the initiative was designed to create a unique platform for teachers with cognitive experience in relevant subject areas to review the past evaluation instruments with a view to generating new ones to enrich the stock of items in its data bank and provide sufficient test items from which the ministry could adequately and reliably draw from for the assessment of students and pupils eligible for certification in JSS 3 and primary six classes.
While urging the participants at the workshop to cover the three learning domains namely, cognitive, affective and psychomotor, to make the test items to be generated valid, Mr Oghoro noted that the ministry commenced the process of examination digitalisation in 2018 in order to facilitate the processing of results.
Oghoro further disclosed that the ministry would sustain its production of timely and credible results through a hitch-free marking of objective items, using the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) machines, adding that all the assembled results issued by the ministry were released online for easier confirmation of certificates and attestation of results.
Earlier, the Director of Examinations and Standard, Mr Sunday Egomaguna, who stated that the workshop on the generation of test items was organised every year, stressed that during the exercise, teachers who were specialists in different subject areas were made to set valid and reliable test items to enrich the question bank for future cognitive/ placement and basic education certificate examinations.
Egomaguna said that each participant was expected to generate 50 multiple-choice, five essays, two practical types and two project type questions as applicable to their subject areas with an adequate marking scheme.
He enjoined primary six teachers in various schools to continue to teach their pupils how to shade correctly the OMR answer sheets, saying that there was remarkable improvement in the shading of the sheets and use of HB pencils during the last examination.
Resource persons including Prof. John Odili of Delta State University, Asaba and a Senior Special Assistant to Governor Okowa, Dr Godwin Edozie delivered lectures during the workshop.
