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Mduduzi Moyo

THE recently released Advanced and Ordinary Level results have further entrenched a growing culture of whiz kids within the school set up.

This trend has seen a steady pattern of pupils who perform well above the expectations of the exam system, setting records, pushing and subsequently breaching limits of the assessment instrument.

Outstanding this year is the story of a 14-year-old pupil, Shalom Zingwe who sat for the Ordinary Level examinations and passed.

Our sister paper, The Herald, reported that the Atlantic Academy Form One learner sat for the Cambridge O-level examination in 2023 and scored three A grades in Computer Science, Accounting and Economics and B grades in Mathematics, Geography and Business Studies.

The school director, Ms Patience Mufokoza, said after consultations with her parents, Shalom would be proceeding to Lower Sixth from Form One, the paper added.

This performance confounded all theories of child education given that the pupil had only interacted with this new level of education for less than a year and further deepened public awe.

This and other performances by candidates in the recent Advanced and Ordinary Level examinations have divided public opinion in trying to comprehend and subsequently explain this trend.

A section of society feels these results are fuelled by exam leaks. The assertion is that this high performance piggybacks on glitches in the exam security system and papers end up in the public domain before their dates of sitting. Given that there were no recorded incidents in the 2023 examination, the assertion falls short of explaining the phenomenon.

Another school of thought implicates educators for pushing learners to beyond acceptable limits by forcing them to write more subjects, fanning a results race between schools in each examination. Pupils are selected and subjected to examination drills as opposed to attending timetabled lessons to achieve results well beyond the operational limits of their peers.

The opinion here is that a full Advanced Level certificate requires just three subjects and that forcing a pupil to write more than three subjects is superfluous and pure aesthetics.

The assertion which may apply to the Zingwe case, also falls short of decrypting the whiz kid phenomenon in that even those that sit the requisite three subjects at Advanced Level also do well.

So the question remains, has the curriculum become obsolete to the extent that examinations are now failing to adequately challenge pupils or has there emerged a new breed of super kids with shifts in technological paradigms?

Educationists believe that the curriculum needs constant tweaking so that content responds to changes in society and that it is time that innovation and technology was infused into the content at this level.

A senior educationist and lecturer at a teacher training college (who cannot be named for ethical reasons) attributed this trend to what is called ‘‘cultural capital’’ in sociology.

“There is what we call cultural capital whereby learners from middle-class families have an advantage over culturally deprived families. These learners start interacting with gadgets like laptops and high end phones which they effectively use to explore the world of knowledge from a very tender age. In this case, their environment is enabling and gives them a head start compared to their peers in deprived set ups who only have to wait for school to experience their first interaction with knowledge,” he said.

This cultural capital has now become more widespread with the rise in internet penetration and the wide use of technological gadgets which offer around the clock access to Artificial Intelligence meaning that the modern learner gets off the block way ahead of the learner of say the 90s. This, he added, is why there is this sudden surge in extraordinary results.

His sentiments were echoed by another teacher who felt that there was nothing untoward about these results and that they simply reflected a yawning gap between a static curriculum and a society that is in a constant state of technological flux.

“This (the results trend) is normal and is a reflection of the changes in technology versus an exam system and curriculum that has by and large remained rooted in pre-tech times. This mismatch is what we are seeing in the results.

“While learning methods have evolved in response to the changing technological climate, content has invariably remained trapped in pre-technology times and this gap is what we are seeing in these results,” he said.

“These kids are growing up in an environment that is slowly falling out of sync with curriculum parameters such that the examination no longer challenges the learner adequately,” he added.

He said the current curriculum which still has it’s roots in physical instruction had been watered down by technological advancements.
With this in mind, he said, it is of interest that the 2023 forms were the group of Form One pupils whose introduction to secondary school learning was interrupted by Covid-19 lock down in 2020.

“One would have naturally expected these pupils to be the worst performing group given that they only had the first term in their first year of secondary education, to grasp the basics of secondary education and that they further went for the formative two years of their secondary school without regular instruction due to the lockdown protocols.

“But thanks to technological interventions like online learning and access to both gadgets and the internet, they have been able to not only pass but pass with a percentage that is higher than other streams who had uninterrupted learning,” he added.

This, he says, further proves that the current curriculum has become ineffective and that the resultant examinations are no longer challenging assessment tools for the learners.

The learners, these educators concur, no longer look at the teacher as the source of information and the school as a centre of knowledge dissemination.

The learner is now learning 24 hours in a day and all the days of the week. This then means the curriculum has to devolve and address a more holistic need in the learners and that the exam system goes beyond testing just recollection but also focus on the application and innovative side of the learning process as early as primary school.

In as much as the country was able to adapt the curriculum in the early 80s to realign it to the changes in the socio-political landscape, another adaptation is needed.

A content-based effort is now required to realign subject matter to technology changes.

Education 5.0 that the Government has implemented with resounding success at tertiary level is just what the doctor ordered.

Innovation and technology should sooner than later be infused into the subject matter at primary and secondary level to tap into the wide array of skills in the modern learner that the current content seems to fall short of doing.

Learners like Shalom need to be challenged by an appropriate body of knowledge to unleash their full potential. The results have proven to all and sundry that the current learners can operate at that competitive level because their environment is seething with potential.

The exam system likewise should be tailored to test content competencies beyond just regurgitation of factual knowledge but the application of such.

The result will be an all-round learner — a suitable piece in the jigsaw of the technological revolution that is the bedrock of the National Development Strategy 1.