Recently, I attended an awards ceremony and among others, it featured a young lady singing the song, “Have a Nice Day” by Bon Jovi. The young singer got the melody right but something was very much missing from her performance. It wasn’t done from the heart. It was like lip-synching. There was no edge to the performance. It didn’t have the spirit of the song. At the end of the performance, I wasn’t sure how to respond to the performance. Should I clap out of just sheer politeness since I didn’t enjoy it?

In Singapore, something similar to this insipid performance is happening in the junior colleges (JCs). The Ministry of Education (MOE) has introduced project work to the junior colleges (equivalent to high schools). It has become  a major part of a junior college student’s summative assessment. It has become part of the high stakes assessment performance for entry to the universities.

As a critic of the high stakes examinations system in Singapore, I am wondering whether I should applaud this move to get our JC students to do project work. While it seems to be a positive step away from the “hgh stakes examinations only” approach Singapore is (in?)famous for, I am uncertain about the spirit behind its introduction. Why was it introduced only at that level? Should the undertaking of any personal learning project work by students be done only at high school level and be a one-off affair? Is this what learning through project work supposed to be about?

If this mode of learning is so important why is it introduced seriously only at that level. At the secondary school level, the MOE has only recently introduced alternative modes of assessment (makes you wonder where all these other modes of assessment were prior to this). But it is not anything similar to the project work that JC students have to do. Is it fair to expect such students to be suddenly faced with such a mode of assessment (yes, it is seen mainly as a mode of assessment and not quite an accepted and generally practised form of learning) only after they have been in school for at least 10 years. Why are such modes of learning rare at the other levels?

The nett effect of this approach means that almost all students and teachers involved in it see it as only another form of high stakes assessment to determine the students’ educational pathway. It doesn’t reduce the importance of the traditional high stakes examinations. It only becomes another adjunct of it.

The spirit of project work which should be done in the spirit of inquiry-based learning is lost. It is not remembered as a learning approach but as an assessment approach. While learning and assessment goes hand-in-hand, it becomes very different when the assessment is seen mainly from the summative angle only and not the formative assessment point of view. The spirit of such learning is lost when the summative angle is the only thing that is remembered by both students and teachers.

The MOE’s introduction of project work is therefore not done with the right spirit. The signal they have sent by introducing project as another high stakes assessment means that few will enter into it, to seriously deepen their understanding of something that is dear to their hearts. It is not about passion for learning. It is about just putting up another performance. Like the singer that I have described at the start, this “heart-less” approach will only at best resemble a lip-synching of the real performance. Should we applaud?