By Carlena Knight
The Ministry of Education is taking steps to improve primary school students’ performance in mathematics.
Education Officer with responsibility for measurement and evaluation, Ineta Edwards, said that teachers, along with education officials, will take part in a summer workshop to achieve this goal.
“The mathematics education officer will be engaging mathematics teachers this week and next … in a workshop where they are trying to drill down and assist them in item writing and strategies for testing and that type of thing.
“So, some work is being done to try and help our teachers for a better performance in their teaching in the classroom,” Francis said.
Students’ sub-par performance in mathematics at both primary and secondary levels has been a long-standing issue.
In fact, Francis, while speaking at Friday’s Grade Six National Assessment press conference, revealed that this year’s results had seen a slight dip in performance; 58 percent of students scored above 50 percent, compared to 62 percent in 2021.
Director of Education Clare Browne said that additional efforts must be made to raise math scores.
“We recognise that if we are going to improve math, then we have to improve the quality of math teaching. We have been doing work and we will continue to do work to ensure that we raise capacity among our math teachers — all our teachers actually, but math is getting special attention … and will continue to receive special attention because of the struggles that we have been having with math through the years, and we will not rest until we get it to a good place,” Browne added.
This year, 88 percent of students who sat the annual Grade Six exam produced acceptable grades, showing a two percent increase over last year’s results.
A total of 652 students were ranked at level one, 565 at level two, 154 at level three, and 15 at level four.
In total, 1,383 students in public and private schools, along with three pupils who were home schooled, sat the Grade Six National Assessment.