Why Academic Institutions in Pakistan are Unable to Give Quality Feedback and Improve Quality of Education

Giving appropriate informed, and structured feedback is one of the biggest weaknesses of most Pakistani schools and other academic institutions. This is especially true for elite Pakistani institutions which spend a lot of energy to give cosmetic feedback to parents rather than a meaningful and constructive feedback.

These institutions are more interested in retaining confidence of parents and students, and are mostly focused on impressing through cosmetic measures rather than providing quality education.

The end result of this trend is that product of our institutions lack essential skills including reading and writing proficiency, mathematical skills, ability to focus and solve complex problems etc.

Generic feedback and satisfaction surveys of students are often damaging to students, faculty and institution because a teacher who does more justice to a challenging subject by covering 30% more content would get poor feedback as compared to someone who may not have covered essentials.

It is easy to see that poor faculty morale will be outcome of inaccurate measurement of quality of education and will create an environment where faculty can not challenge the students to take up more challenging problems and therefore gain skills which are highly sought in the market.

Poor feedback mechanisms will also be damaging for institutions, where some students may prefer easy going institution as compared to a more challenging ones. In the long run, this would damage both the student and the institution whose students will never recommend someone later in their life due to poor outcome of their education.

More challenging institutions would be more difficult to get in and would require lot more work to produce graduates who would be highly sought after and eventually more successful.

One such case study that I am familiar with is quality of computer science graduates. Computer science graduates being produced by many institutions may have high CGPA's but lack programming skills, knowledge and proficiency in SQL and OOP, may not know essentials of Operating Systems, and may never have been exposed Linux Operating Systems.

HEC, NCEAC and other government bodies are also not playing their role to ensure quality of education, employability of graduates being produced when rating or evaluating institutions working under their supervision.

If institutions were serious about quality of their graduates, then they would be measuring proficiency of their students in key areas according to well defined learning goals; as a result we would not see this situation. Institutions are only interested in measuring student and parent satisfaction while paying little or no attention to quality of education and quality of students being produced.

Student/Parent satisfaction is not a measure of quality of education, and does not give any meaningful insight into learning goals being met and does not correlate with success of student.

Currently the feedback being given in parent-teacher meetings is mostly generic and useless, for example:-

 1). Student needs to focus more

2). Students need to work harder etc.

 Interestingly similar feedback being given for all the subjects !

It is obvious that institutions are interested in measuring student/teacher satisfaction because it correlates with success of institution to attract more students and be able to charge higher fees for their services.

 1). Giving Structured, Informed Feedback

 Here's how appropriate feedback should look like :- 

Mathematics

Here's list of weak areas that need improvement :-

a). Time Management in Paper

b). Quadratic Equations

c). Non-Linear Equations

Here's another useful example on giving appropriate feedback :-

 Addition and Subtraction

________ is able to calculate addition and subtraction facts to 18 with confidence and accuracy.

________ is becoming more able to calculate addition and subtraction facts to 18 with confidence and accuracy.

________ requires more time and practice in calculating addition and subtraction facts to 18

________ needs to put more effort into learning to calculate addition and subtraction facts to 18.

Skip Counting

________ is able to skip count forward and backward by twos, fives, tens, and hundreds to complete short patterns.

________ is learning to skip count forward and backward by twos, fives, tens, and hundreds to complete short patterns.

________ needs practice with skip counting forward and backward by twos, fives, tens, and hundreds to complete short patterns.

________ needs considerable practice with skip counting forward and backward by twos, fives, tens, and hundreds to complete short patterns.

Improvement Areas

a). Need to revise quadratic equations and solve problems of medium to moderate complexity to achieve desired results

English

Here's list of weak areas that require further improvement :-

a). Writing style

b). Spelling mistakes

c). Sentence Structure

d). Writing proficiency

Improvement Areas

a). Need to practice free-form writing on a variety of topics included in your curriculum. Do some research by reading relevant content to improve your knowledge.

You can structure the feedback along similar lines for all subjects.

2). Improving Focus through Mind Games

Students in developed countries including Russia, China are engaged in mind games including Chess that teaches them strategies, impact of poor strategies on outcome i.e. success or failure. Along the way, students learn how to focus for longer duration to be able to solve complex problems.

You must introduce Chess at all levels starting at very early stage, so that students can develop their mental capabilities and can potentially compete at highest levels in the world in chess. This would also help them excel in artificial intelligence, computer programming and gain advance strategy skills.

3). Exercise Programs 

Many schools in the world have introduced well defined exercise programs including daily running for 1-2 kilometers, aerobics etc to help students stay fit, develop better concentration levels, avoid gaining weight and to stay fits. Sadly, I have not seen any such initiative from your school and this is true for most Pakistani schools. Kindly improve in this area.

Why Schools are Unable to Give Quality Feedback ?

Schools are unable to give quality feedback, because they fail to set learning goals for each of the subjects. Failing to set well defined learning goals is the most obvious and great indicator of poor quality education. Next step in mapping goals to student performance, and feedback. Obviously, if goals are not well defined than feedback would be generic and of poor quality. Lacking student level feedback means there is no way class level feedback or institution level feedback is available or possible. This is institutional blindness at its best which is what is happening in our country at all levels. The main reason for our inability to take informed decisions are lacking will, ability, vision and desired data.

Conclusion

Quality of education depends on the precise measurement of the standards of education, and collecting meaningful measurement of the quality. Improving quality of feedback would not only help the students and parents, it would also help the schools themselves in terms of improving their performance.

For example, schools can detect systematic problems e.g. poor writing skills and conduct repeat lessons, workshops to improve students and teachers in these areas. Again, most students are having poor focus so schools can engage them in activities such as Chess to help them improve their focus and strategy skills.