The Tribune

By LETRE SWEETING

lsweeting@tribunemedia.net

THE Ministry of Education announced the start of the learning loss assessment tests for next month in partnership with a private international learning analytics company.

The ministry has partnered with Renaissance Learning Incorporated to provide the tests in cycles of assessments and remediations from February to June at all public schools.

The assessments are set to affect some 40,000 students.

The announcement took place at a press conference yesterday.

Education Minister Glenys Hanna Martin said the learning loss tests will be used to measure the loss of knowledge and skills, or reversals in academic progress in Bahamian public school students following the pandemic in an effort to keep attendance at the high rate it is at today.

“The testing that we’re going to be talking about will allow us to specifically and strategically target responses and interventions, which will ensure a higher success rate,” Mrs Hanna Martin said.

“In this effort to pursue data, we did a survey with the department of statistics to find out why many of our children were not online. And we got to make a survey about and we were able to understand specifically what the issues were impacting young people and children, which caused them not to be able to access the virtual learning,” she said.

Mrs Hanna Martin also mentioned several ways her ministry has been preparing data for this learning loss initiative.

“We also knew that many children and young people were not attending school in the thousands and thousands. We did walkabouts nationwide, every island, every community. As a result of that, we were able to get data from that experience,” she said.

“We were able to find out in each community, how many children were not attending, and we were able to understand the most vulnerable schools and communities with the data. We then appointed attendance monitors, who took to the streets to help us ensure attendance in schools as a counteract to the learning loss caused by the pandemic,” Mrs Hanna Martin said.

“I’m pleased to say that today we are measuring 94 percent attendance in our schools nationwide. We are also undertaking research projects, which are helping us to understand and battle how our children are learning data,” she said.

“I would like to say that over the last seven days, we have engaged stakeholders nationally, we’ve met with thousands, literally thousands of stakeholders, administrators, unions, teachers, parents, the intent of this very important exercise is to test, measure and design acceleration programmes,” she said.

“This will allow our teachers in the classroom to have the empirical data as to where each individual child is placed and to designate remediation or acceleration programmes based upon the outcome of those tests,” Mrs Hanna Martin said.

Acting Education Director Dominique McCartney-Russell said that preparation for the initiative has already started.

“In the next two weeks, we want to ensure that they know how to assess the children. And once that is completed in February, we’re going to start with the assessment,” she said.

“We are going to seek to provide at least two assessments, each session will be about 20 minutes. And that remediation will be applied. And that remediation will come from Renaissance but Renaissance will also provide strategies for our teachers. So we will assess, remediate, assess, remediate. We’re hoping to complete this particular process by the end of June,” she said.