There are very sound educational and pedagogical reasons for using methods like Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE), despite its implementation being complex and difficult. The country is discovering these challenges, now that the Right to Education Act has mandated CCE up to grade VIII.

In CCE, every child’s learning is assessed on an on-going basis, and that is used in an integrated manner to teach the child better. As an example, that a child is having problem with fractions, is assessed in the class, the issues carefully noted, and then relevant strategies used in the next classes to help the child.

This method is in sharp contrast to the child taking a test at the end of the term and getting poor scores on fractions, which is of little use, aside from telling the child “you didn’t do well”. The CCE system develops a rich document of a child’s progress on multiple dimensions, through the term, which is pedagogically useful. But it doesn’t give any scores or “marks”. Read More