CHAPTER ONE

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1   Background of the Study

Assessment is not a recent origin; some scholars contended that assessment of all kinds originated from the Garden of Eden. The reason advanced from such claim in the hypothesis that God created man in the garden and issued some rules. Adam and Eve disobeyed one of the rules and ate the fruit of knowledge (Genesis 3 v 1 – 7).

Assessment was also practiced by ancient Greek Roman, Egyptian and Chinese in our Traditional African society, it was practiced but every informal tell the advent of Western Education, formal assessment in our education system was introduced with the advent of external bodies like the royal society of Art (RSA) West African examination council or internal bodies like classroom teachers. The result of such assessment in test or examination had serious academic implications for the teachers and the students. The taught, strictly according to the syllabus and the students did everything within their reach to ensure success as it was a passport for better life and better job. Nothing was spared to achieve better academic continuous assessment in educational system.

In response to the live and cry of the generality of the people ills associated with one slot assessment examination, the federal Ministry of Education (FME 1981) introduced as one of its component features, the use of continuous assessment has been a subject of discussion in our educational circles in Nigerian. This, it was hope, would eventually call students’ tendency toward examination fraud.

Guskey (2008), advocates using assessment as a means to determine how well a teacher has taught a specific concept or skills. The assessment process can inform the teacher about what the student have learned and which concept and skill have to be re-taught. In order to improve achievement, the assessment process has to be an essential ingredient of the overall instructional process. After a teacher teaches a specific concept or skills, the need to assess their students, mastering the lessons instructional objectives. Akpan (2007) mentioned that continuous assessment of students progress as an educational innovation in Nigeria took off in 1982 after the revision of National Policy of Education Unit in (1981).

Continuous assessment according to Ezewu (2007) is a systematic and objective process of determining the extent of students’ performance and all the expected change in his/her behaviour from the day he / she enters upon a course of study, and a judicious accumulation of all pieces of information derived from this process with a view of using them to guide and shape the student in his / her learning from time to time to serves as bases for important decision about the child.

Educational assessments was evaluation liberalized by using them in whole or in part on continuous assessments of progress of the individual child on this continuous assessment take cognizance of the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains of human behaviour.

Bassey (2009) pointed out that, the principal tools for this type of evaluation was the pen and paper test and examination. Students were therefore indirectly encourage to memorize a collective of fact to be used doing examination. The summative evaluation does not take into serious considerations the unique role of the local condition of the students to be tested such condition include student health, school setting, the socio-economic factor of the children and the culture of the community.

In an attempt to operationalize the policy division on continuous assessment, the federal ministry of education on continuous assessment, the federal ministry of education through it educational evaluation unit of schools and educational services division mounted a strong campaign to workshop organized on continuous assessment the federal ministry of education has   produced the first handbook ever on continuous assessment in Nigeria. This ninety three pages manure is indeed an invaluable contribution to the debate on continuous assessment.

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