Theological Foundations for Interfaith Dialogue in Islam

According to Qur’an, the difference of opinion among peoples of the world is natural and something that will always be there. However, in order to stop the difference from becoming a conflict, people should hold dialogue. The significance of dialogue in Islam is well understood by the fact that God chose to hold dialogue with angels concerning the creation of man. Furthermore, the Qur’an declares dialogue the greater jihad and arrangement of a successful dialogue is considered as a manifest victory In order to arrange a successful dialogue, Qur’an lays out a number of principles: 1- Dialogue should be held in such a nice way that it may lead the opponent to get a close friend. For this it is necessary to speak mildly and the dialogue must be based on wisdom and sincerity. 2- Dialogue should rest on the principle of mutual respect and should not contain any kind of abusive and taunting language. 3- Dialogue must not override the principle of justice and equality and must not be affected by the past experiences or personal grievances towards the opponent. 4- Dialogue should not address the issue of pulling everyone together, e.g. The opponent (for example a nation) should not be blamed for the evil deeds of few. 5- Dialogue should be held with an attitude that is characterized by patience and tolerance and efforts must be made to keep the vicious elements out from harming the process. 6- Both parties should openly acknowledge and recognize the mutually positive attributes. 7- Imposing one’s opinions upon the opponent must not be the objective of dialogue. 8- Both parties should, despite the inherent difference of opinion, pursue to find practical solutions by striving towards finding a common ground.

Examining Grades As Valid Measures of Secondary School Students Competence in Mathematics

In teaching learning process, grades are used to communicate the degree of students‘ academic achievement but it is generally perceived that those grade that the students acquire after any assessment procedure do not represent their true achievement (Allen, 2005). According to Allen (p.219) those grades usually present multiple pieces of information about the student achievement instead of producing any single academic mark. Standard based curriculum provides the assessment agencies those set of academic marks called students learning outcomes for which those agencies can design their assessment tools. In Pakistan, standard based curriculum was adopted for secondary classes for the session 2012-13 onward and this study was conducted to explore those measures taken to implement that curriculum for the subject of mathematics by Boards of Intermediate & Secondary Education (BISE), Punjab, Pakistan. There are nine BISE in the Punjab and they function alike under the supervision of Punjab Boards Committee of Chairmen. Two Controller of Examination and five paper setters were interviewed to obtain the information about steps taken prepare standard based assessments. In standard based educational setup, a third party audit is considered mandatory to assess the alignment between curriculum and assessments. For this purpose, a web based application called Webb Alignment Tool was used for investigation of alignment between the secondary school curriculum for mathematics with assessment tools 2013 and 2014. As prescribed by Webb (2005) in manual of Web, five reviewers were selected for the study having knowledge of educational assessment and educational standards. The reviewers were M.Phil. Education and four of the five reviewers were secondary level mathematics teachers having master‘s degree in mathematics. The researcher worked as coordinator/reviewer as advised in the manual. Although alignment studies mostly meant to identify the alignment between standards and assessment (Case et al., 2004), yet in Pakistani context, textbooks are also an essential component of the teaching learning process so textbook contents vs. curriculum standards as well as textbook content vs. assessment alignment was also analyzed. For identifying the alignment between the curriculum standards and textbook of secondary level mathematics, a tool called CurriculumTextbook Alignment Framework (C-T Alignment Framework) was modified and used with the permission of author. This tool was developed in a study under the title ―Alignment between Science Curriculum and Textbooks at Secondary Level in Punjab‖ by Saeed (2013). Alignment between the textbooks and the assessment was made through document analysis for which the assessment tools 2013 and 2014 were compared with the contents of the textbooks. According to information collected from the Controllers of Examinations and the paper setters the` paper setting procedure is same for every subject and no major change is made in that procedure after the adoption of standard based curriculum for the session 2012 onward. No training was conducted on making of standard based assessments. It was identified that for 21 learning outcomes/skills of the secondary school curriculum, no corresponding benchmark is designed in the curriculum. It was also noted that 73% of learning outcomes/skills are of DOK level 1 and don‘t challenge students for mental processing. The curriculum is void of any learning outcome/skill of DOK level 4 and there are only six learning outcomes/skills of DOK level 3. Some of the mathematical concepts/task were found to be phrased both as benchmarks as well as the learning outcomes/skills. Moreover, same learning outcomes/skills were also found to be repeated within and across different grades. The secondary school mathematics curriculum doesn‘t ask for any learning experience/applied curriculum to be included. Textbooks were found to be designed in a monotonous format in which student are given guidance about procedure or algorithm of solving sums. Some of the textbook contents don‘t match with any learning outcomes/skills of secondary school mathematics curriculum by MoE (2006). It was found that the assessment tools were below the acceptable values for the criterion of Range of Knowledge Correspondence that also in directly affected the criterion of Balance of Representation. It was learnt that virtually every question item was selected from textbook contents. Through this study it was recommended that BISEs should regularly arrange teacher training on techniques of developing standard based assessments and attending such trainings should also be declared as a pre requisite for a paper setter. Anomalies in the curriculum should be removed and quality of prescribed learning outcomes/skills should be improved by adopting ―fewer, higher and deeper‖ (DarlingHammond et al., 2013, p2) approach. In the light of international practices, it is suggested to integrate the learning experience/applied curriculum with the list of learning outcomes/skills. Some of the textbook contents should be eliminated that didn‘t match with any learning outcomes/skills. Alignment studies should regularly be conducted. There should be an assessment framework and paper setters should be guided not to select any item of DOK level 2 and above from the textbook contents.