Student Performance Review

Here is another one for the teachers. An interesting difference to Australian schools.

Now, just to review. I am a teacher at a private high school and junior high school in countryside Japan. I will refrain form naming the school (because I have not asked for their permission), but I am not that far from Tokyo. It is still one hour away from where I live though. I am an English teacher at this school. I am falsely labelled as an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) as I am not "assisting" any teachers at all. Many of the ALTs in Japan are employed in the CD-player type positions, team-teaching with a Japanese teacher in which the language of instruction is probably 50-50 Japanese/English. I have been employed with all of the same responsibilities as other Japanese teachers, warts and all, and teach 9 classes on my own. I am the only native English speaker (read: foreigner) in the whole school, so I am teaching mainly English conversation classes instead of grammar-related. There are quite a few English teachers in the school and their responsibility is to teach grammar - big-time grammar translation methodology. They try very hard and I appreciate all of their effort to teach the students.

We have just finished the first term of the year (3 terms at this school), so the students are about to go on 夏休み (なつやすみ, natsu yasumi) from July 18 to August 29. And it is hot! There is enormous pressure on teachers to mark their papers and input the results within 2-3 days. For me that is around 250 students worth. I will let you ponder what that actually means in terms of assessment though. I have some grave concerns about the validity and reliability of these exams, including the assessment instrument. It is not nearly as rigorous as where I have come from. Nowhere near. However, that does not mean that the students are not as capable. There are many points of view about this. I am not in a position to change anything soon, so I am not going to express my frustrations that much. Let`s just say that we are not seeing the students` true capability through this style of assessment.

The process is as follows.

Administer the test. In most cases, the teacher has prepared a test paper, with content and questions, with a separate answer sheet. The answer sheet is handed in at the end of the exam and the students keep the test paper. The paper is marked and the results are given in percentage format. The answer sheet is then returned to the students, and they keep it!! This includes the 3rd year HS students (Grade 12). It is common practise for the teachers to photograph, scan or photocopy the results of students who failed or just failed in case of questionable changes on return.

For the teachers, it is not nearly finished. The results are inputed into the content management system and then converted by code to a different format. For some reason that I am yet to fully understand, the percentage is converted to a number within the range of 1-10 (10 being the highest). It is not a simple divide by 10 system though. And then, the score out of ten is converted to a number within the range of 1-5 (5 being awesome). All of the scores are then collated for the individuals and then the classes. We have department meetings to ensure that the final results do not have any serious anomalies and then a year level meeting to discuss the top and bottom students. We also have to give a detailed... carefully collected.... record of how many lessons each class (and therefore student) has had and how many absences for each student. These absences must have an accompanying reason as well, as this will be used in the discussions. For example, if a student went home early 5 times out of the 25 lessons with the same excuse, we might have to delve deeper into any patterns (days, subjects etc.). The Head of Year will double check all of the information with each Home Room teacher in the Year level meeting and we will all problem solve any issues that arise. It`s not over yet though.

Yesterday, all staff members gathered for a 成績会議 (せいせきかいぎ, seiseki kaigi), which could be translated as a "Student Performance Review". I was warned cautiously, wich turned out to be not quite what happened, that the Principal will angrily ask why students are failing etc.. That definitely didn`t happen though. The Heads of Year individually spoke on the performance of the students in their grade and provided everyone with an extremely detailed printout of the top students (on overall average), the performance of scholarship students, the academically weak students from each class, the absences, the reasons for absences, the student infringements etc.. It was pretty amazing for me, but most staff did the national past-time of taking a quick powernap.

What this means for staff, is that no one is in the dark about students, whether it is their performance or their conduct. Whether it is necessary in this format could be debated, as well as whether this frantic production of data, stressful as it was, is practical and informative at this stage of the term. Anyway, I found it interesting.