Nigerian Primary Schools' Compliance With Nigeria National Policy On Education

The importance of and preference for evaluating learning outcomes, using a wide variety of instruments and containing data from a wide variety of sources, rather than the use of one-shot and one-type examinations, have long been recognised worldwide; hence the Federal Government of Nigeria mandated, in 1982, the use of evaluations of this nature, referred to as continuous assessment, in Nigerian Schools. Several problems confronted its planning, and now its implementation. The authors of this study went out in the field to evaluate the nature and scope of activities and problems that have to do with implementing continuous assessment in Nigerian primary schools. The findings of this study suggest that, by and large, the continuous assessment procedure is accepted in preference to the previous narrower scope of one-shot evaluation, but many problems continue to threaten the benefits derivable from using this method to evaluate primary school pupils. Suggestions on how these problems can be addressed are offered.