Imagine that you are seeing a doctor to attend to your illness. In his spanking new clinic with all the new equipment, you feel safe and reassured by all the framed degrees on the wall. You are in the safe hands of a professional. You enter the consultation room and meet your doctor. He greets you and asks you what was wrong with you. He takes out his stethoscope and and his thermometer and tests your temperature and listens to your heartbeat. He then tests your blood pressure and tells you what he has found out about you.

You wait for his diagnosis and what he thought the prescription for your malady would be. But to your surprise after diagnosing you he tells you that is all he has for you and does not prescribe any medicine. You ask and he still just tells you that if you are still ill in two days, you are to pay him another visit, A little perplexed you go off and return in two days as no prescription was given for your illness and it did not go away. The same routine repeated itself and again you are told to go home without any prescription. What would you be thinking of your doctor now?

Similar things happen in many schools and other educational institutions today. Teachers today are very geared towards assessment. In many schools, the form of the assessment is usually of the summative kind as in the case of high stakes examinations or semestral examinations. Often these assessment are done with little follow-up action to ensure that learning has taken place for the students. This is akin to the story of the doctor above who only does tests on you but gives you little or nothing in the way of prescription about your illness. Does your child have such doctors in his school?