Educational assessment in Ghana: The influence of historical colonization and political accountability

ABSTRACT The educational system in Ghana has undergone various reforms as a result of colonisation, changes in government and constitutional amendments. These reforms have been accompanied by changes in educational assessment programmes. This paper explored the history of educational assessment in Ghana, understanding how educational reforms, colonisation and political accountability have shaped the use of assessment information in contemporary Ghanaian educational context. High-stakes nature of large-scale assessment in Ghana has cultivated infertile ground for teachers’ formative assessment practices. Assessment is mainly perceived as serving accountability purposes, obscuring the improvement function (i.e. formative purpose) of assessment in students’ learning and fuelling ongoing tensions between classroom assessment and the more visible, higher stakes summative assessments. Research-informed assessment policy and sustained collaborative professional learning about assessment are critical to support a conceptual shift among all educational stakeholders to help them understand, value, and use formative assessment to support the learning needs of every students.