CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The existentialist Nigeria education thought seeks to distinguish between the British idealism, which breaks an elicit society, and the America pragmatism which nature a nation on practical men. The Nigeria philosophy gave direction and energy to the national conference curriculum development sponsored by the Nigeria educational research council in 1969, that conference was a momentous landmark in the history of educational development in Nigeria. It was a prevailing practice in most of all institutions of learning and evaluation of the students performance in one final examination was in tenable fraught with psychological paradoxes and expensive in time and money, dangerous and frustrating. The performance at the school certificate, students in this country then were totally poor. This could be seen from the results of school certificate examination between 1974 and 1977. The percentage passes stand as follows; June 1974-51% June 1975-47.4% June 1976- 43% The system of a final examination at the end of the year secondary school course by an external examining body as West Africa Examination council is unrealistic.
Discouraging and destructive of potentials. This does not encourage the cultivation of study habit student fizzle away their variable period of four years, rise from their lethargy and stop in the fifth and face belatedly to the labor of completing tasks long postponed as the fathom of the final examination looms before them. For the leisure, the fear of failure at the end of gruesome five years compelled cramming, without ply, relaxation in the crucial final month. This situation breeds high casualty rates for students and teacher, the system breeds unsystematic and irregular application to duty and more, it breeds the tendency to dishonestly since the feeding is to ensure success at all cost and by all means fat or foul. The answer to this lies in continuous and cumulative assessment and evaluation. This spreads out evenly throughout the year and eliminates for the final onslaught. This rates out the central examining bodies and reduces the influence in a final examination.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
With the national policy on education, it was of the opinion of the policy makers that, continuous assessment will form the overall and about 60% of all examination in primary and secondary school respective. And also there ill be an inclusion of training in the continuous assessment of pupils in programmes of pre-service teacher education in teacher training colleges and of in-services training in the national teachers institute as planned in handbooks on continuous assessment titled “teachers education”. The above opinion and assertion on continuous assessment are bedeviled by the following: i. the present test items in most primary and secondary schools cognitively biased on the determent of the effective and psychomotor domain. ii. that the task force on continuous assessment set up in 1978 appear dormant and ineffective. iii. Seventy percent of serving teachers are ignorant of what to do and how to do them. iv. The problem of comparability of standard appear elusive, the continuous assessment system came in the wake of the new national policy on education in 1977 and revised in 1981. One of the distinctive features of new policy on education is its emphasis on continuous assessments.
