Education for Sustainability (EFS): Investigations on Performance Assessment Issues, Needs and Recommendations for the Qatar Education System (QES)

Questions determine our fate as individuals and societies. Asking the right questions at the right time and in the right context makes our choices and decisions meaningful. As human beings, we all experience this from an early age. In education, in order to evaluate the growth of students, the professional development of teachers, and the overall efficiency of the system, questions become an integral element of the complex, non-linear and social system at different levels. Over the last decade, reforms in the Qatar Education System (QES) have received ever-increasing attention at the local and regional levels. QES has been undergoing various reforms since the early 2000s, and decisions, policies, plans, and practices have changed frequently, leading to various unexpected and undesired issues among all stakeholders, mainly students, teachers, and parents. Achievement levels of the system’s essential outcomes (i.e., graduates and their learning levels) have still been lower than average OECD and benchmark countries with slight improvements. This study, first, offers a comparative review of the QES developmental history and aims to provide a comprehensive perspective on the issues and challenges that it has faced thus far. The study starts with a brief historical preface of the basic education system and its development during the past decades. Then, it focuses on more specific aspects of the system to identify the underlying issues and possible solutions. It also makes recommendations toward a homegrown, locally relevant, targeted, and holistic student performance assessment (PA). This study aims to understand the performance assessment from a quality perspective, combining the engineering approaches of “systems and design thinking” and social research approaches of qualitative research and “constructive alignment”. It attempts to discover locally relevant and locally developed recommendations on how the performance assessment can be designed in alignment with the Sustainable Development and Education Goals (SDGs & EGs) as well as the Qatar National Vision (QNV 2030) as perceived, or as it should be perceived, by stakeholders. This study: (i) presents a theoretical and qualitative analysis of PA practices in the QES; (ii) provides a comparative analysis among the best PA practices at the global level; and (iii) examines the methodology, conditions, and findings based on learning from: (a) the successful experiences of other countries, (b) documented analyses of local past experiences, (c) local stakeholders (through a qualitative investigation) in order to understand the needs, develop recommendations and design a tailored PA strategy. The results indicate that there are misalignments between the core educational components such as EGs and the assessment methods used to evaluate their achievement. The analysis and findings reveal that the QES urgently needs to develop a PA strategy that is appropriate for its stakeholders to meet the EGs and enhance their sustainability competencies. Finally, this study proposes a PA framework for the QES to align its core elements with SDGs and EGs. Then, the proposed Performance Assessment Framework (PA FW) is validated by conducting a survey of 808 educators. The chi-square test was used to assess respondents’ answers concerning the validity of the proposed PA. Moreover, qualitative analysis was used to holistically and comprehensively verify the elements and design of the proposed PA FW. However, the proposed PA FW was planned to provide a rich data collection which can assist decision makers to empirically test educational practices and track the progress of educational outcomes. Thus, future research should provide an information system strategy aligned with the proposed PA FW for the purpose of self-evaluation.