Assessing Quality of Education: In Perspective with Continuous Assessment and Learners’ Performance in Adwa College, Ethiopia

Abstract

This study attempted to explore education quality in Adwa College of Teacher Education. The general objective of this study was assessing the quality of education in the perspective of continuous assessment and learner’s performance in Adwa College of Teachers Education. The study explored the class size and its influence on education quality; conditions of implementing continuous assessment and learners’ performance in the college. To explore all these researchers employed census method (72 teacher respondents). The study finds that in average there are 52 students in one class. Because of large class size regular giving of take-home assignment, careful scoring of the students’ work, adequate monitoring and supervision of the students’ class work, easy identification of the gains and difficulties of each student and providing feedback to individual students is not possible. Moreover, the college continuous assessment format is difficult to implement in the ground and it has been doing nothing to help students’ performance since there is copping assignments. Especially, it is difficult to implement in some courses. Furthermore, teachers have a problem to take attendance daily in classroom. Performances of students in individual work and presentation and students’ general knowledge is poor. Moreover, habit of students to read and their readiness to use library is poor.  Moreover, students’ academic background is low and there is high cheating in time of exam in the college. In general the main obstacles that hindered education quality in the college are students’ low performance and background, lack of controlling cheating in time of assignment and exams, lack of follow up to students and lack of support to students. Furthermore, large class size and inappropriate implementation of the continuous assessment are other problems that deteriorated education quality. Therefore, the regional government should make overall expansion program on the college especially, constructing buildings to address the class size.  Moreover, college should make the entrance time of fresh students on time. College should also consolidate network activities (cooperative learning) as a basic strategy and rent rooms from the nearby schools in time of exam.

Keywords: Adwa, Education quality, continuous assessment, class size, students’ performance.