The Department of Basic Education has pleasure in releasing subject exemplar booklets for School Based Assessment (SBA) to assist and guide teachers with the setting and development of standardised SBA tasks and assessment tools. The SBA booklets have been written by teams of subject specialists to assist teachers to adapt teaching and learning methods to improve learner performance and the quality and management of SBA.

The primary purpose of these SBA exemplar booklets is to improve the quality of teaching and assessment (both formal and informal) as well as the learner’s process of learning and understanding of the subject content. Assessment of and for learning is an ongoing process that develops from the interaction of teaching, learning and assessment. To improve learner performance, assessment needs to support and drive focused, effective teaching.

School Based Assessment forms an integral part of teaching and learning, its value as a yardstick of effective quality learning and teaching is firmly recognised. Through assessment, the needs of the learner are not only diagnosed for remediation, but it also assists to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The information provided through quality assessment is therefore valuable for teacher planning as part of improving learning outcomes.

Assessment tasks should be designed with care to cover the prescribed content and skills of the subject as well as include the correct range of cognitive demand and levels of difficulty. For fair assessment practice, the teacher must ensure that the learner understands the content and has been exposed to extensive informal assessment opportunities before doing a formal assessment activity.

The exemplar tasks contained in these booklets, developed to the best standard in the subject, are aimed to illustrate best practices in terms of setting formal and informal assessment. Teachers are encouraged to use the exemplar tasks as models to set their own formal and informal assessment activities.