2017 NGSA results to be unveiled this week

Jun 27, 2017 News

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Are you anxious about the National Grade Six Assessment [NGSA]? Well, according to officials at the Ministry of Education’s examination division, all anxiety will be put to rest this week as the results of the 2017 NGSA

will be unveiled before the end of this week.
More than 13,000 pupils participated in the assessment which targeted schools, both public and private, across the country.
Officials have not yet revealed the identity of the top performer this year, but last year there were two pupils who claimed that coveted title – Anthony Ferreira of Mae’s Under 12 and Aryan Singh of Dharmic Rama Krishna both attended privately-operated schools and secured 568 marks.
For the past four consecutive years, private schools have been dominating the top performing spot.
However President of the Guyana Teachers’ Union [GTU], Mr. Mark Lyte, has long made it clear that public school pupils are performing well too. He however noted that the public schools are faced with more challenges than that of the private schools which may result in the performance shortfall at times.
Among the challenges that have been highlighted by Lyte, is the fact that public schools have to deal with all children in order to fulfil the mandate of universal primary education. Some private schools on the other hand, the GTU President noted, have the privilege of screening children before they accept them.
“When compared to the private schools which are producing top performers year after year, the public schools are severely affected, since most private schools screen children for acceptance. Public schools work with each child that shows up,” Lyte asserted.
It could therefore be easily deduced, Lyte noted, that private schools are likely to yield better results than public schools based on their process of acceptance alone. But this is not the only factor that could speak to the disparity between the performances at the public and private schools.
According to Lyte, public school teachers are faced with a gamut of impacting factors such as: large class sizes, limited teaching resources, unsatisfactory working environment, education management deficiencies, unprofessional conduct of education managers, poor remuneration, burdensome record-keeping procedures, poor classrooms, which are sometimes void of ventilation and proper lights, among others.
The 2017 sitting of the NGSA was conducted on April 12 and 13. The assessment is designed to determine where pupils are likely to undertake their secondary education.
Earlier this year, pupils were required to sit three mock examinations as part of measures to prepare them for the April assessment.
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.
Because of this deliberate intervention, Chief Education Officer, Mr. Marcel Hutson, said that he anticipates improved performances in the public education system this year.
“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 kinds of approaches that we are seeing now are the 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 during an interview with this publication.
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”.
As part of the measures to address the performances in Mathematics, aimed at improving the NGSA performances, were the hiring of monitors and coordinators. This aspect has been deemed difficult, according to Hutson, who also noted that “these persons are tasked with focusing specifically on Maths in the school system”.
Hutson is confident that the efforts plugged into preparing the pupils will translate to improved Mathematics performances when the results are unveiled this week.

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