FOR MANY years, a feature of our education system was the implementation of tests and examinations of students’ areas of knowledge on all aspects of the curriculum.
It is time to re-introduce the evaluation of the extent to which students have absorbed what they have been taught.
Clearly, from an administrative point of view, it is not possible to immediately introduce a comprehensive examination process.
Nevertheless, it should be possible to have a well-thought out examination system before the end of the 2023-2024 scholastic year.
The purpose would be to, as far as feasible, to accentuate the positive, namely to encourage our students to greater endeavors in the future.
There should also be exercises from the data obtained from the performance of individual students to establish how different schools perform relative to each other.
Also, if there is sufficient cooperation between public and private schools, we should obtain information as to how both sectors have fared relative to each other.
I suspect that, particularly for economic reasons, students from private schools have been more successful than their public school counterparts at overcoming the problems associated with COVID.
Evaluations from examinations are not meant to cast blame on any individual student or school, but merely to recognize the extent to which problems exist.
For example, in the past we have participated in comparative studies introduced by the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). These studies have generally shown that we do not fare well in these studies. In fact, we appear at, or near, the bottom of international comparisons. We should not feel overly defensive if this is still the case. Instead ,we should face up to the problems and endeavor to do better in subsequent studies which, hopefully, would be conducted during the scholastic year 2024-2025.
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It is good that Vice President and Department of Education Secretary Sara Duterte is engaged in discussions with Japanese officials to discuss partnership opportunities in education. Last week’s meeting with Sakamoto Takema of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) introduced the possibility of education sector development training and the recruitment of Japanese volunteers to teach Filipino students. I believe there is a significant chance that the performance of our students in mathematics in particular could be greatly improved by exposure to Japanese experience, particularly in terms of the benefits of reinforcement when learning maths.
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Overall, I believe that we can greatly improve the results of our students if we emphasize the significance of examinations in evaluating performance./PN
