Rethinking assessment for a post-Covid-19 education dispensation in South Africa: challenges and opportunities

Abstract

The onset of Covid-19 the world over has impacted educational processes in a way never seen before or imagined. Education systems across the globe have responded to the Covid-19 induced disruptions in the manners mediated by their contexts. These responses were dictated by how each country's health system elected to meet the pandemic onslaught head on. In the South African context, the country was put under a lockdown which meant that work and school lives were disrupted in an attempt to offset the onset of the pandemic. Fast-forward, after enduring two years characterized by the unfortunate loss of lives, disrupted schooling and attendant learning losses, the South African education system has embarked on a post-Covid-19 reorganization which entails a review of the current education curriculum and its assessment regime. Although currently the direction of the curriculum change trajectory is still unknown publicly, the proposed changes in the country's assessment regime have been specified and they entail the following: 1) the elevation of assessment for learning to offset the centuries of domination of a testing culture that both colonial and apartheid eras have bequeathed to democratic South Africa; 2) the creation of space for the use of information and communications technology in enhancing assessments as learned from education delivery during Covid-19, including item banking; and 3) the introduction of the General Education and Training Certificate (GEC) as a way of streamlining education in the pre-high-stakes levels of education delivery. The paper will discuss all these three innovations in assessment reform as opportunities for South Africa in resetting its education system for a post Covid-19 era. Of importance will be a discussion of the opportunities and challenges that each innovation presents, given the historically socially unjust contexts and inequalities obtaining in education under a democratic South Africa.