MBOSE Question Papers and Critical Thinking

Iwamon Laloo and Glenn Kharkongor

According to a news item that appeared in this newspaper on May 28, 2018, MBOSE is “planning to review the pattern of question papers for the board examinations”.  Mr. Pravin Bakshi, the then executive chairman of MBOSE told The Shillong Times “that a move has already been made to set question papers that will evoke the creativity of the students”. According to him, “education is not memorizing lessons, but it should spark critical thinking”.

Bravo to MrBakshi! I do not recall any MBOSE administrator speak about improvements in the school education system and these comments come as a breath of fresh air. Surely this will spark much needed reform in the examination pattern and provide a more meaningful education for our children in the state.

In this article we will first analyse the quality of the 2018 SSLC question papers of MBOSE. Secondly we will compare the pattern of MBOSE question papers with the 2017 CBSE Class X, and also the 2017examination papers of the General Certificate for Secondary Education (GCSE) of the UK.

MrBakshi has used two important adjectives for the word ‘thinking’: creative and critical. Creative thinking implies imagination, idea generation and inventiveness.Critical thinking means the ability to reflect, analyse and critique. While these qualities are different, both require elaboration, integration and synthesis. For both to be useful, they must lead to application and innovation, so that new ideas and tools can be developed.

But do school children have these intellectual abilities. According to Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development, a theory that all academicians are familiar with, the fourth and final stage is the development of ‘formal operations’. During this stage, which begins at age 11 years and continues into adolescence and adulthood, the young individual can form abstract concepts, use multiple variables in systematic ways and connect thoughts and ideas in critical and creative ways. Apart from abstract thinking they can also integrate their visual, auditory, kinesthetic senses and also comprehend the importance of attitudes, values and morality. In other words, children that appear for the matric examination had developed higher order mental abilities several years earlier.

The problem is that the educational system is not challenging enough and conventional examinations do not measure children’s ability or achievement in a valid and meaningful way.

Pyramid of Cognitive Skills

A useful framework that captures levels of cognitive ability is Bloom’s Taxonomy, a tool that perhaps all teachers know about. It can be depicted as an ascending order of cognitive skills from simple recall to creativity.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a useful tool to guide teachers in designing approaches to teaching-learning that develop higher order mental skills. It is also a tool that can guide the construction of question papers. If a student has higher order thinking skills then the examination papers must include questions that measure these higher abilities.

Mostly recall questions

Unfortunately MBOSE question papers seem to mainly measure recall ability, forcing students to memorise large amounts of material to pass the examination. A very small proportion of questions require the understanding of concepts and principles and only rarely are questions that need analysis, application, synthesis or creativity, included in the question papers.

We looked at MBOSE examination papers in the subjects of English, Social Sciences and Science to measure the proportion of questions that required recall, comprehension, or higher order thinking skills. See Table below. It was difficult to break up the marks in the table because Bloom’s levels were different between the Eitherand Or options, another deficiency of the question paper.

Table I Type of questions in MBOSE

In the question paper for English, which includes language and literature, the vast majority of marks was given to recall questions. Most of these recall questions required the memorisation of passages and facts from the prescribed texts. In this section, one question was: “Maria Sharapova reached the world number one position in women’s tennis on: (i) Monday, 22 August, 2005 (ii) Monday, 26 September, 2005 (iii) Friday, 22 August, 2004. It is difficult to understand the importance of this memorisedpiece of trivia, that too in an English examination.

In MBOSE, compared to the CBSE and GCSE, only a small fraction of the questions required comprehension and higher order skills. In the GCSE, the majority of questions tested higher skills. See the table below:

Table II Higher order questions %

Here is an example of a good question from the CBSE science paper: Water is an elixir of life, a very important natural resource. Your Science teacher wants you to prepare a plan for a formative assessment activity, ‘‘How to save water, the vital natural resource’’. Write any two ways that you will suggest to bring awareness in your neighbourhood, on ‘how to save water’. In a GCSE paper, a picture was shown of a crowded beach and the student was asked to write an essay on how the beach could be protected from environmental damage.

The CBSE question papers use tables and diagrams and the GCSE papers also include pictures. In contrast none of the MBOSE papers have tables, graphs or diagrams. The chemistry paper does not even have a one line chemical equation, nor do the physics or biology sections have any graphics at all.It seems that the paper setters are neither serious nor inventive. This is reflective of a systematic malaise.

So what now?

A workshop should be conducted for paper setters to improve the mix of questions. This is an important first step and seeing the new pattern of questions, schools and teachers will be influenced to change the manner of teaching and preparation of students for the board exams. In anticipation of these changes, schools could be sent samples of model question papers before next year’s examinations.

An NCERT expert group on education of tribal students, has observed that the “school curriculum fails to take account of tribal cultures as autonomous knowledge systems with their own epistemology, transmission, innovation and power.  The cognitively ethnocentric demands of concentration on and memorisation of the content of the text by `rote’, all prove problematic for SC/ST children. Testing procedures too are based on urban middle class values – the competitiveness and system of rewards that examinations represent is often culturally anomalous to Scheduled Tribe children who are brought up in an atmosphere of sharing.”

Board examinations aim to measure one-time performance. The main usefulness of this is to compare the result of one student with a large cohort in a cross-section manner. It would be better to profile the achievements of individual students by listing the competencies they have achieved, such as numeracy, problem solving and social ability. Perhaps MBOSE could pioneer these radical but relevant concepts.

With an education policy being finalized for the State, this is a timely opportunity for MBOSE to make long-overdue reforms in its factory approach to school education and examinations.Operation New Hope in Ladakh is a successful example of an indigenous approach to relevant education. Instead of the three ‘R’s, they have three ‘H’s: Bright Head, Skillful Hand and Kind Heart.

The authors are from Martin Luther Christian University