Shamala Kumar
Chief among my concerns regarding the announced major curriculum revision to general education is the lack of a document open to public scrutiny. Public institutions must be accountable to the public. Instead, PowerPoint presentations, news snippets and casual discussions with Ministry officials are all I must go by as I put a spotlight on the “psychometric tests” to be introduced in Grade 9. According to the Ministry, they consist of literacy and numeracy skills tests and a “career interest test [technically an inventory, not a test] (July 22, 2025, Daily Mirror).
Psychometrics
Psychometrics refers to the measurement of psychological phenomena, using measurement/test theory and research, to capture psychological characteristics primarily for educational, employment, or therapeutic purposes. Psychometricians aspire to develop standardised tools effective in capturing the same human quality across time, space and people. These tools require consistency when administered and interpreted.
Psychometrics has a long and sordid history with roots traceable to Francis Galton and the horrifyingly racist Eugenics Movement of the 19th Century. Galton believed that the human race could be made more intelligent through selective breeding and the Eugenics Movement was built on the understanding that White people, relative to others, are genetically superior in intelligence. Even today, scholars continue to raise concerns that test scores may serve to marginalise and further disadvantage students representing ethnic and racial minorities. Historically, in the US, psychometric test scores have been used to justify high stakes decisions that are particularly unfriendly to Blacks, reflecting a general possibility that differences in scores are always in danger of being interpret in ways that are consistent with our preconceptions, a consideration we must always guard against.
Assessment of Bias
Psychometric techniques can assess if an instrument is unfair to a particular group of individuals. Sometimes instruments may demonstrate that scores vary in meaning across subgroups, in which case scores cannot be uniformly treated across these populations. The US Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, NCME, 2014) states:
“…characteristics of all individuals in the intended test population, including those associated with race, ethnicity, gender, age, socioeconomic status, or linguistic or cultural background, must be considered throughout all stages of development, administration, scoring, interpretation, and use so that barriers to fair assessment can be reduced.”
Such considerations require extensive validation research, which is generally publicly available. I could not find such information regarding the tools that the Ministry plans to use.
Career Interest, Literacy and Numeracy tests, and the General Curriculum
Career interest.The Ministry’s plan is to use an interest-inventory as part of a career guidance programme, to help students choose between different subject combinations and decide whether to pursue academic or vocational routes. Career interest does not assess a person’s competencies, it literally measures only their interests. Supporting students in choosing areas of study that interest them is wonderful, but a career is somewhat different; it’s about selecting a vocation based, one would think, on many considerations. Of course, one might question whether a 14-year-old should be making academic decisions based on career aspirations at all, or whether the Sri Lankan job market can genuinely meet the public’s varied aspirations, but, that discussion is beyond the scope of this article. My concern is that, in my interactions with Ministry officials, there seems to be a troubling misunderstanding of the purpose of these instruments.
My worry also stems from my experience as a parent navigating the education system. Trying to understand why my son was taught the way he was, made me realise the deep neglect in the system. Teachers are left without a structured continuous professional development (CPD) programme and must fend for themselves, relying on commercially available but poorly regulated resources to decide what and how to teach within the guidelines provided. It is in this rather base context that these assessments are to be introduced.
Assuming the career interest tool shows adequate psychometric reliability in validation research, how will teachers use it? To what extent will their guidance be influenced by their own preconceptions and biases? Teachers with limited training and significant influence in schools may inadvertently use these scores inappropriately.
Literacy and Numeracy. The announcement also mentioned the introduction of literacy and numeracy tests, but it remains unclear how these will be used. During an informal discussion, a Ministry official referenced the US policy “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) in connection with these tests. NCLB is a Bush-era US policy (early 2000s) that ties student achievement scores to school performance evaluations. At the time, psychologists warned that relying on test scores to assess schools could have unintended detrimental consequences. Looking back over two decades later, research shows that test score gains under NCLB were only weakly linked to actual educational attainment, lowered teacher morale and fostered exam-focused classrooms that diminished interest in broader learning. Sri Lanka already faces these consequences of high-stakes testing with our Ordinary Level (OL) and Advanced Level (AL) examinations. Furthermore, since OL results already assess achievement in language (Sinhala, Tamil, English) and mathematics, introducing new literacy and numeracy assessments for tracking purposes seem redundant.
Using literacy and numeracy test scores to compare school performance assumes that all students are comparable. However, some students face developmental or neurological challenges that affect their performance, and may drag down a school’s results. Many countries that use psychometric testing extensively provide special needs accommodations, but Sri Lanka currently lacks trained assessment specialists accessible to all schools. More troubling, accommodations require that students be clinically assessed and officially classified as “disabled.” In contexts where such diagnoses remain taboo, the social stigma can be severe. There is also the risk that students struggling with literacy or numeracy might be wrongly labelled in attempts to protect overall school test scores. Psychologists have warned that policies like NCLB could encourage score manipulation, ultimately harming the quality and fairness of education.
Limitations of Psychometrics
In addition to these concerns, there are aspects of psychometrics that should be considered when implementing such a programme in Sri Lanka.
Firstly, although psychometricians tend to believe that any psychological phenomenon can be quantified, quantification is never fully successful; meaning that validation research indicates that measures vary in their ability to predict outcomes. For instance, Hanna and Rounds (2020) show a relatively high level of success, 50%, in career interest inventories predicting later choice of career. However, this indicates that for the other 50% of the cases, the prediction is unsuccessful.
Furthermore, the commonly used RIASEC career interest tool shows only low positive correlations with job performance, persistence, and career satisfaction (De Vries et al., 2024), This means that even scores of a well-researched interest scale, while associated with valued outcomes, cannot account for much variation in them. Teachers must fully understand these limitations.
Secondly, the characteristics assessed are generally limited by costs and time, leaving only a few statistics on which to base decisions. These limited characteristics have political connotations. For instance, assessing school performance through numeracy and literacy or using career interest alone to guide students subtly suggest that other characteristics matter less.
Thirdly, the individual is the unit of analysis used when a tool’s ability to predict outcomes or level of bias is assessed. How historical social conditions reflect on scores, however, can remain unaccounted for in these analyses. These limitations may result in the systematic marginalisation of groups.
Finally, although scores can be combined with other information, such as students’ background and constraints, the scores themselves can have an overpowering effect, as they may communicate an unwarranted sense of objectivity and certainty (Gitomer & Iwatani, 2022). They may, therefore, disempower teachers and students in the career guidance process, and remove the student’s agency, and diminish the confidence with which teachers draw on other resources when helping students.
The Ministry’s intention to provide students with career guidance is timely. Its effort to promote alternative career paths, beyond the aspirations of becoming doctors or engineers, is forward thinking. Likewise, identifying schools struggling with student achievement to offer them additional support is a worthy goal. The challenge, however, is how to achieve these aims with minimal negative impact on students, teachers, and the wider education system.
Teachers already feel weighed down by excessive compliance demands within schools. Teacher facilitation through reintroducing strong CPD programmes, professionalising guidance roles within schools, and ensuring that both staff and institutions have the resources and flexibility to plan initiatives that genuinely enhance student outcomes may better serve to enhance morale. Ladd (2017) notes, the NCLB policy introduced two important measures: raising teacher qualification standards and making school-level data publicly available. Both steps would improve teacher training and ensure transparency and strengthen Sri Lanka’s education system without the need to replicate NCLB-style policies.
