Types and forms of assessment tasks in the textbooks

When teachers asked about the different types and forms of assessment found in the textbooks they are using, they indicated that textbooks have enough assessment tasks. There is a variety of assessment tasks available in the different prescribed textbooks used in the Business Studies classroom. Teachers mentioned that textbooks have different examples of assessment tasks that help learners when doing tasks for School Based assessment. The different assessment task available enriches learners in almost every Business Studies domain that needs to be touched on. These assessment tasks differ from textbook to textbook.

There are questions that are dealing with presentation, there are questions that are dealing with investigations where learners are sent out to their community to try and engage in information about Business Studies. (Nandi)

There are more case studies assessment and short questions assessment. (Nelly)

Teachers are proud to say that the activities available are both practical and theoretical in nature, which help the learners for the outside business world. Textbooks provide learners with practice of what occurs in the business world and the basics of the field. Teachers mentioned that there are adequate practical and theoretical activities to equip learners with the

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foundational skills of a business. With these activities, learners are able to gain interest in continuing with the field of Business Management. In most of the textbooks used in the Business Studies classroom, teachers are able to enrich the learners’ knowledge with the assessment task.

Yes, they are, as I said and they are practical as well as theoretical so the assessments covered in the books require learners to answer by writing and some require learners to be practical so it differs. (Zinhle)

Other activities require learners to go out and do research about business that are around them, so I can safely say that these textbooks have enough activities for homework and classwork. (Nonhle)

Textbooks also allowed learners to acquire interactive skills and working together with one another and individually through group work and individual work. Learners are able to gain other learners’ perceptions when working together to achieve one set goal. Working with other people is very essential for the world of work, where you need to interact with others in a team to achieve a set goal for the certain business or company. Muhle said that there are different forms of assessment where learners are required to do activities in groups or individually:

“It is said in the textbooks that this activity is group assessment or individual assessment.”

Teachers indicated that there are activities in each topic but they are not enough for both class work and homework. Activities and tasks for homework and class work are very scarce; teachers therefore resort to consulting other resources for the benefit of both the learners and teachers. Resources another then the textbooks used in schools can somehow be every relevant and accurate in terms of its recent publication. So these activities that the learners will engage in, will be of benefit as they will be engaging in recent content and relevant divisions of the cognitive levels demand. One of the teachers who participated in this study indicated that in the textbooks that she is using, there are not enough activities for learners to consolidate and review what they have done in class:

There is very little, you know when you are teaching homework and class activities are very important but you will find that in a subtopic there is one activity and then that

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activity you might use for a class test, and there is no activity for homework. You can see that if you stick to these activities in the textbook, you might end up not assessing your learners quite enough. (Zinhle)

Another participant mentioned that the textbooks she is using have enough activities for homework and classwork, but she was concerned with the quality of the assessment tasks On the one hand, there is enough but on the other hand, there is the problem of the quality of those activities. It is important that assessment activities be of benefit to learners in that they should cater for different cognitive levels. It is advisable that assessment activities as well as the content learnt mostly range at the higher level of difficulty. The more difficult the activity, the greater the challenge for the learners and the more the learners are motivated to work hard.

It doesn’t really help them to have quit a number of homework’s and classwork activities that are not really preparing them for deeper learning and understanding of the concept. (Nandi)

Yes, Platinum does have many homework and classwork tasks, because there is always an activity the activities for classwork are enough as well as homework. (Zinhle)

Textbooks do not have adequate activities, quality questioning of assessment task and accurate content. Among all those good qualities, we cannot say that teachers are fully pleased with the prescribed educational textbooks.