PESHAWAR: All educational boards of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa will conduct the upcoming annual examinations for matriculation and intermediate courses by replacing the decades old pattern of question papers with a new one to assess the learning outcomes of the students.

The administrations of these boards have separately communicated the decision to the headmasters of government and private educational institutions though a letter, saying the learning outcome of the students will be judged in the next annual examinations, sources told Dawn.

The sources said under the new pattern to be renected in papers, the students` knowledge, comprehension and application would be assessed in accordance with thespirit of the latest curriculum developed in 2006.

`Until now the papers` format is mostly 1(nowledge based, which the students gain through rote memory,` one of the chairmen of an education board told Dawn.

`But now we are moving from rote learning to conceptual learning,` he said.

Currently, only defined questions mentioned at the end of each lesson of the subjects appear in the question papers, which students mostly resolve by rote memory, the board chairman said.

He said in the upcoming annual examinations to be commenced in March and April, the questions would not come from the defined questions in each lesson rather the paper makers would create their own questions from the content of the lesson.

Under the new paper setting, 50 percent will be comprehension, while application and knowledge would be 25 percent each.

`Under this system high order thinl(ing would be created in the students who now mostly rely on rote learning,` he said.

Under the 2006 curriculum, teaching should be based on activities in classroomand teacher-students interaction, which never followed in the educational institutions, he said. Contrary to the curricula requirement, teachers in classrooms apply the traditional way of teaching in which the students` learning outcome couldn`t be judged, he said.

A board`s controller of examination told Dawn that paper setters didn`t bother to create own questions under the existing pattern and instead, they went through the question papers of the last two or three years and selected questions from them.

`Now, the paper makers will have to go through the content of the lesson for creating a question,` he said.

The controller said the new pattern would also help in the eradication of the menace of cheating in the examination system as the different publishers have prepared pocket-size guides for using in cheating. The pocket-size guides have no other use rather only promoting cheating, he said.

As test case, the controller said, the new pattern of paper was applied on the physics paper of part-II of intermediate last year inwhich a large number of students were failed.

`The student didn`t say that paper is out of course rather they were complaining that paper is very difficult,` he said, adding there was nothing new but only questions were not selected from among the questions mentioned at the end of the each lesson.

Sources in education department said that each board would select subject specialists for training in creation of questions from the content of the lesson.

The provincial Directorate of Curricula and Teachers Education would arrange training for the subject specialists as it was very difficult to construct a good question, they said.

`It is need of the hour to divert students from traditional rote learning and memorisation to conceptual learning, understanding and critical thinking,` read the letter circulated by the boards to the educational institutions.

It added that the move would enable students to focus on conceptual learning instead ofrote learning.