The government will review external assessments in the first and second cycles in the hope of improving the diagnosis of learning, said a deputy education minister who sees the key to schools’ problems in “rankings”.
“We are going to make changes in external assessment, especially in basic education, and we believe that with these improvements in external assessment, the ‘rankings’, by association, will also become more useful,” Alexandre Homem Cristo told the Lusa agency, which incidentally publishes school rankings.
The changes included in the State Programme and to be announced by the end of July affect the 1st and 2nd cycles and provide for the replacement of the current assessment tests with universal and compulsory assessment tests in Portuguese, Mathematics and a variable subject every three years in the 4th and 6th years.
“We will work as hard as we can, within the limitations of the nature of the tests, to make the comparability as reliable as possible, so that the guidelines we can later have based on the results are also more accurate and more insightful about where we have problems and we can intervene,” he predicted.
Regarding the school rankings published this Friday, Alexandre Homem-Christo did not devalue the lists and, while acknowledging that they have limitations, considered that “a transparent mechanism for publishing results should always be considered as an added value.”
The Secretary of State said “rankings” could potentially reveal “clues to questions” about how to improve teaching and school performance, and contextual data could improve that assessment and “compare what is comparable”.
In addition to the equity indicator introduced by the previous leader, which tracks students in need throughout each cycle, looking at how many manage to complete it within the expected time, this year the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation also published data on foreign students and on schools located in priority intervention areas (TEIP).
“All these indicators are important not only for diagnosing problems, but also to ensure that we do not fall into false diagnostics of problems,” the government official emphasized.
Alexandre Homem-Christo also warned about the need to “know how to read” “rankings” and asked about the relevance of comparing, for example, the results of national secondary education exams from year to year, when the tests are always different, he explained that the goal is always to maintain the same level of difficulty, but “comparability has its limits”.
“We see that when the average scores of students fluctuate up or down, there is always the idea that students may have improved or worsened proportionally to that value, which is a false idea because, that’s all, the scores are not even always comparable,” he explained.
However, he insists on the usefulness of these lists and stresses the advantage of engaging “the whole of civil society in the analysis it considers most appropriate. With this rich analysis we make diagnoses,” he concluded.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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