The Secondary Health Syllabus for Years 7 – 9 is written using the outcomes based approach to education in Solomon Islands. This syllabus is based on an outcomes based curriculum framework with a philosophy of a learner centred teaching pedagogy. It is based on learning outcomes as curriculum standards. These are curriculum requirements that should guide the planning for effective teaching and learning strategies as well as designing and setting of valid, fair and reliable assessments. These standards or curriculum requirements will become the assessment benchmarks for assessment at the school and national levels using both the formative and summative form of assessments.
Assessment is defined as a continued planned process of gathering, analysing and interpreting information and data about students learning. It is a process of seeking and interpreting evidences used by learners and their teachers, to identify where the learners are in their learning, and where they need to go to and how best to get there. It is important that teachers diagnose and identify learning abilities of the learners in order for them to develop and implement intervention strategies to improve both the learning process of learners and teaching approaches of the teachers. Teachers should support learners who have acquired the learning outcomes or curriculum requirements in order to maintain their level of performance and similarly assist leaners who have not acquired the requirements with remedial tasks. This is to enable learners to acquire curriculum requirements and progressed on with their learning. Therefore such assessment strategy is aiming towards improving learning and teaching processes and should focus more on a learner centred teaching pedagogy.
The assessment information and data gathered from such assessments can be used for improving the learning and teaching processes in the classroom and for making informed decisions regarding assessments in the schools and national assessments and examinations. Furthermore, such information and data will also inform the Curriculum Development Division (CDD) and National Examination and Standards Unit (NESU) of the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development (MEHRD) as well as the School of Education and Humanities (SOEH) of the Solomon Islands National University (SINU) on how the prescribed or the intended curriculum was taught and learnt in schools and how best to improve both the teaching and learning processes and implementation of valid, fair and reliable formative and summative assessments.
It is the Ministry’s plan to examine all subjects at the end of Year Nine (9), the final year level at the end of the Universal Basic Education in Solomon Islands. It would mean that all subjects offered in the national curriculum would need to offer school base assessment (SBA) as part of the formative or continuous/internal assessment. The SBA should be implemented as part of the teaching and learning processes and is focussed more on learner centred teaching philosophy. The purpose of having an SBA is for assessing skills that are not assessable in the summative and national examinations at the end of the term, semester or a year. Furthermore, such an ssessment approach is required to strengthen key components of the formative assessment, that is, to be more valid, fair and reliable in terms of having common assessment tasks (CAT) in a more organized manner as well as creating provisions for teacher designed assessment tasks (TDAT) to meet the learning needs of learners within the school context and learning environment.
Detailed information, guidelines and appropriate weightings for SBA and internal assessment for Secondary Health can be obtained from the subject prescription handbook.