Assessment in Nigerian schools: a counsellor’s viewpoint

Assessment is aimed at finding out how much a child has acquired in terms of learning skills but also takes into consideration the personal-social development of the child. In Nigerian schools, assessment, most often than not is concentrated on cognitive achievement to the detriment of affective and psychomotor development of learners. This paper reports the findings of a year long survey examining the implementation of Holistic Assessment Measure (WAM) among secondary school teachers in Ilorin, Nigeria. In WAM, a student is assessed as a total entity using all the psychometric devises such as test and non-test techniques. Data were gathered through interviews and focus group with 500 randomly selected teachers. Results suggested that WAM was perceived as useful by 90% of the teachers to clarify assessment expectations. However, only 5% of the respondents admitted to employing WAM in the assessment of their students. 95% of the respondents do not factor affective and psychomotor measure into the overall performance of their students while 10% of the respondents claimed ignorance and incompetence in the use of non-test devises. It is recommended, that in-service training be organised for secondary school teachers in Nigeria, to educate them more on the need for WAM in the attainment of the overall educational goals.