Analysis of the first five years of Ghana's BECE results in General Science

Abstract

An essential part of the machinery of education is examination. It has become fashionable to disapprove of examination as a means of stimulating effort in pupils to regard their influence on school work as unnecessarily vicious, and to suppose that their only legitimate function is the selection and classification of pupils after they have passed through some part of the educational machine. This fashion is unfortunate. Examinations fulfill a double function: they are a mobilising force in education, and they also provide a means of testing its results. The stimulating and mobilising power of examinations affect teachers, schools, textbooks and administration, but it is exerted through the medium of the individual pupil. In this study, an attempt has been made to examine and analyse the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) papers in General Science for the first five years conducted by the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC) to see if the objectives of the Junior Secondary School (JSS) science syllabus has been fulfilled. From the analysis, it may be concluded that the BECE examination organised by WAEC in the first five years has not been fair to the candidates. There has been a lot of over testing and under testing in most of the subject-matter content areas. Little attention has been paid to content validation. It is about time that the constructed tests provided a balance measure of the intended learning outcomes so that no area is over emphasised or neglected.

JOURNAL OF THE GHANA SCIENCE ASSOCIATION Volume 1 Number 2, January (1999) pp. 1-9