'Use extra classes for evaluation purposes' - Lecturer

School authorities and teachers have been urged to use the extra or vacation classes to carry out more assessment and evaluation of learners on the content of the syllabus.

The essence of extra/vacation classes, if it should be held at all should be to address specific educational needs and weaknesses of every child from the teaching process.

Dr Dandy George Dampson, a Senior Lecturer and the Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Education, Winneba, gave the advice in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Accra.

He said: “It is unfortunate that some schools are abusing the purpose of the exercise and are using it as a conduit for money-making without achieving much of the end results”.

Dr Dampson said the practice where some teachers leave out some topics which should be taught in the normal class with the ulterior motive of solely teaching it during extra or vacation classes was a cause for concern, adding that learners who fail to attend the classes become unduly disadvantaged.

He said the prime purpose of extra classes should not be for monetary gain but for the teacher to make a value judgement based on each child’s performance with regards to the content taught.

“Extra classes hours should be the period during which parents complement the role of teachers by interacting with their children and assessing their knowledge on the expected learning outcomes whilst teaching them moral lessons coupled with family values,” he said.

The Lecturer said when parents conduct this exercise at home during the period, they gather valuable information on the learning competencies, disabilities and qualities of their children which should be communicated to teachers to be addressed during normal school instructional hours.

Dr Dampson said children needed to recuperate their minds through playing and family interaction during vacation, adding that it was worrying that some parents tend to misuse this opportunity by damping their children at school only to pursue their private and financial needs.

He said even though vacation periods were also to serve the purpose of recuperation and relaxation by learners, if any classes should be held at all, the time allocated for kindergarten one to class three should be one hour and class four to class six should be one and half to two hours in a day, with the sole purpose of addressing the learning disabilities of each child.

Children, he said, who have multiple learning disabilities which tend to be persistent in class needed to be handled by a professionally trained psychologist, adding that multiple problems of a child should be tackled on a piecemeal basis.

Dr Dampson said a mix of both trained and untrained teachers, with periodic in-service training could produce satisfactory results.

He said the practice where some teachers expected, demanded or requested monetary or material gift from parents especially at the end of the term must be discouraged because it was unprofessional and has the tendency to influence teachers “to wear discrimination lenses” against children whose parents could not afford anything.

He urged the Ghana Education Service and parents to empower teachers to desist from unprofessional behaviours to enable them uplift the image of the teaching profession.