The nature of assessment is central to everything that students ‘do' – it governs how they study and learn.

After successful completion of Teachers' Learning Sessions phase I & phase II, Zindagi Trust's Education Department entered its phase III of assessment held on 10 th , 11 th & 13 th July 2007. Ms Jahanara Shiraz, Incharge Academics, facilitated the teachers' learning sessions. One of the basic philosophies of the newly developed curriculum is to bring a paradigm shift from teacher-centered to learner-centered teaching practices. With this paradigm shift the major objective of phase III sessions was to make teachers realize and enhance their understanding of students' assessment procedures. Assessment has been a crucial area of education and has it's own significance in teaching and learning processes. In order to make assessment procedures effective, a new comprehensive On Going Assessment program has been introduced to measure teaching and learning outcomes. According to this program, the use of varied assessment techniques, that is both formative and summative, was seen as desirable for Zindagi Trust I-am-paid-to-learn schools. There would be only one final term followed by ongoing assessment based on daily classroom teaching. The marks of daily assessment will be included in the final term.

Teachers critically reviewed questions and exercises given in the primary textbooks and indicated that most of the questions are based on testing students' memory rather than assessing their understanding of the content. During the session teachers got the chance to design test papers based on Attitudes, Skills and knowledge.(ASK)

These sessions led teachers to re-think the importance of on-going assessment and realized that only assessing children knowledge is not enough, but their skills & attitudes are also important. Students will be involved in a learning process during assessment in spite of rote-memorization Hopefully, this program will help teachers to assess students in a better and logical way.