Many public schools are paying lip service to competency-based education, and giving their students misleading or pointless exam questions, the Humanistic Education Foundation told an online news conference on Wednesday.
Despite being a major goal in the national curriculum guidelines since 2019, many educators still do not understand competency-based education, the foundation said.
Foundation executive director Joanna Feng (馮喬蘭) said that students at an elementary school in Taoyuan were asked to read a text on the COVID-19 pandemic during a math exam, which was followed by unrelated basic math tasks, including rounding numbers and reading Arabic numerals in Chinese.
A high school in Kaohsiung tasked students with multiple-choice questions on the 1935 Taiwan Exposition as part of a competency-based exam, Feng said.
However, the only skill needed was memorizing dates and historical facts, she said.
To improve competency-based exams, the foundation has formed a task force to collect and review exam questions from schools across Taiwan, she said.
“Public misconceptions about competency-based education have to be dispelled,” she added.
Huang Chin-fei (黃琴扉), an education professor at National Kaohsiung Normal University, said that educational topics should be based on students’ daily lives.
“Test questions designed to test competency should be linked to real-world knowledge,” she said, adding that educators should not design complicated questions that frustrate students.
Former National Changhua University of Education president Chang Huey-por (張惠博) said that competency-based curricula should not contain exams that deceive students.
“Education authorities should incentivize teachers to write better test questions,” he said.
Tseng Shu-cheng (曾旭正), an architecture professor at Tainan National University of the Arts, urged the government to create a test question database that includes a rating system, saying that this would encourage drafting good exams.
Beitou Community College president Hsieh Kuo-ching (謝國清) said that cram school advertisements are in part to blame for spreading myths about competency-based education.
“Writing exams is only one of many methods that should be utilized to provide guidance, not the end-all and be-all of education,” he said.
“Educators should focus on encouraging students to pay attention to things happening in the world around them and applying knowledge in situations in their daily lives,” he added.
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