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Third ‘Mock’ Exam to be administered ahead of 2017 NGSA sitting – Education CEO
This year’s sitting of the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) is slated to for April 12 and 13. However, Chief Education Officer (ag), Mr. Marcel Hutson, has disclosed that even before participating in the scheduled national assessment,
Chief Education Officer (ag) Mr Marcel Hutson
which is designed to determine where they are likely to endure their secondary education, pupils will have to undertake yet another ‘mock’ examination.
Already pupils slated to sit the 2017 NGSA were required to participate in two mock assessments. These were held on January 31 and February 28, 2017 respectively. But, according to Hutson, pupils will again be assessed on March 31.
Even as he spoke of the two completed assessments, Hutson revealed that “our children did much better at the second mock assessment and this tells me that our children are aligning themselves with what is expected.”
Pupils are usually tested in the subject areas of Mathematics, English, Science and Social Studies at the NGSA. Mathematics has been one of the areas that the pupils have, over the years, been showing severe signs of weakness. This had, moreover, prompted a Governmental order for measures to be engaged by the Education Ministry to address poor performances in Mathematics.
Moreover, Hutson, during an interview with this publication, revealed that the Ministry has introduced measures that have been directing keen focus on helping pupils to apply problem-solving skills.
“I think that over the years, when we look back at the statistics, when we would have done the analysis, we would have seen that they experienced difficulties in problem solving or higher order thinking and I believe the kind of approach that we are seeing now are those approaches to address these difficulties. The measures that we have implemented are geared to get our children to become solution oriented with regards to the problems they would have seen,” Hutson explained.
He added, “We don’t want our children to give up and say this is too difficult a problem for me to solve, but by having the exposure and the experience I think that over time our children will become better and better.”
Hutson is confident that the efforts plugged into preparing the pupils will translate to improved Mathematics performances at this year’s NGSA.
According to the Education CEO, he has sought to impress his view that without the success of the implemented measures, the problem will not go away.
“We are looking at this from a Grade Six perspective, but when we look at the plan of action, we are also looking to deal with this in the long term, and so from Grades One right through we will be walking our children through,” Hutson added.
As part of the measures to address the performances in Mathematics, aimed at improving the NGSA performances, has been the hiring of monitors and coordinators. This aspect has been deemed difficult, according to Hutson. These persons, he noted, “will be focusing specifically on Maths in the school system, and they are being paid to do that in addition to the teachers who are there. We will have persons monitoring and coordinating, so we will get a sense of how our children are progressing from the lowest grade, which is Grade One.”
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