The Ministry of Education (MOE) says it is set to introduce a new National Standardised Test to evaluate learning outcomes at the primary school level.
The Minister of Education, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, said the test will be administered for the first time this year to all primary four students across the country.
According to him, pupils waiting 11 years before they sit for their first national exams, Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), makes it too late to correct the literacy poverty the country records.
Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum stressed that the test will generate reports which will detail the challenges facing the education system across the country in some core subjects.
“In countries that education has been transformed, they test students at the national level every year in addition to any test that is organized at the school level. So the primary 4 national standardised test is going to the government, the people of Ghana, districts, regions, House of Chiefs, media, and everyone to know how well our primary schools are doing. If a child goes to kindergarten and at the national level, we have no idea how they are doing, till 11 years on at the B.E.C.E, you cannot intervene.”
“The 11 years come, they take the test, and it’s done but when you test them in primary four as we are going to do this year, what it enables us to do is to really measure what the World Bank calls learning poverty. By year 10 how many students can read? If we know that we have a serious problem as defined by the World Bank in terms of learning poverty, we go to work, provide intervention in primary five, those who are doing well, we check to see their best practice and then use their best practices in other schools around the country to make sure that we do well as a nation,” he added.
SOURCE: CITINEWSROOM
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