Capacity Building Workshop for the Optimizing Assessment for All (OAA) initiative

Optimizing Assessment for All (OAA) is a collaborative project of the Governments of Nepal, Cambodia and Mongolia with the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. The initiative is being undertaken by the Brookings Institution, and is designed to highlight the need for constructive use of educational assessments with a focus on 21^st century skills, and to develop capacity in designing assessment on Transversal Learning Competencies (TVCs). OAA is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4– to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all children.

OAA is being coordinated through the offices of the Network on Education Quality Monitoring  in the Asia Pacific (NEQMAP), based at UNESCO Bangkok. Nepal's Education Review Office (ERO) is an active member of the Network, contributing research expertise to the Network and benefiting from its collaboration.                                               

Objectives of OAA

The main objective of OAA initiative is to support countries to improve the assessment, teaching, and learning of 21st century skills. The objective of OAA can be specified in the following points:

a)   To support regional and national stakeholders in measuring learning across transversal competencies, with consequent capacity for teaching these skills.

b)   To develop skills on identifying how these skills are included in the curriculum and how they are to be taught and assessed.

c)   To strengthen education systems’ capacity to integrate 21st century skills into their teaching and learning in order to better promote the goals of education systems in developing their students’ readiness for work and lifelong learning.

Arrangement for the implementation of the OAA initiative in Nepal

A country technical team has been formed representing the expertise from assessment, curriculum and pedagogy to work on the project.  Four schools from Kathmandu are selected for the implementation of the project. They are: Sisnery Secondary School, Lalitpur; Mahendra Gram Secondary school, Lalitpur; Changu Naryaan Secondary School, Bhaktapur; and Manohara Secondary School, Kathmandu.

Workshop in Nepal

Three collaborative capacity development workshops have been designed in each of the participating countries Cambodia, Mongolia and Nepali. The first major convening of the collaboration will take place through a regional workshop Kathmandu, Nepal from May 28 to June 1, 2018. The workshop is hosted by Education Review Office within Nepal’s Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, and supported by Brookings Institution. The participants of the workshop are the technical teams from three collaborating countries Cambodia, Mongolia and Nepal. In addition, teachers from four pilot schools of Nepal, and experts from the Education Review Office as well Curriculum Development Centre in Nepal will also participate in the workshop. This workshop is the first in a series of three workshops for the project, each hosted by the participating countries in turn. This workshop will be held at SAP Falcha, Babarmahal, Kathmandu.

The focus of the first workshop is the development of assessment frameworks for 21^st century competencies that are informed by country-specific curriculum reviews. As part of the week’s activities, the participants will also visit schools in Nepal as an opportunity for the visiting international and national teams to understand the classroom contexts of Nepal. Understanding the classroom contexts is essential in developing formative assessment tools that can provide information for teachers and students about how students are progressing in their learning of 21st century competencies and the next steps for teaching and learning.

For further enquiry and contact for the workshop: Deviram Acharya, Education Review Office, Sanothimi, Bhaktapur, Nepal; email: deviramac@outlook.com; Phone: 977-9851193542.