7 News Belize

Education Ministry Says Take Time Out From Testing
posted (April 22, 2020)

Today on Ask the Experts, the focus was education - one of the sectors most affected by the COVID shutdown.  

School have been shut down since Friday March 20, and - one month in - the focus is on distance learning - how to give meaningful instruction to thousands of students who are at home.

Today, the Deputy Chief Education Officer stressed that distance learning does not mean distance testing for pre and primary school students:

Cecilia Smith - Deputy Chief Education Officer, MOE
"The ministry has taken up the mantle to organise how learning happens at the two lower levels, the pre primary and the primary level because really what we want to do for students during this time is just to keep them engaged in a way that they will continue to develop their thinking skills, their creativity skills, their social skills and that type of thing at home. We do not expect that students at this level will be assessed formally in any way during this period. It is the very reason why we have ahead and we have cancelled the national standardised exams at this level because this is not the time for that. We do want to keep them engage but we are not concerned about making sure that they get a particular grade on a particular subject at this time. Certainly at those two levels, the intention is not to engage them in any kind of structured formal way so that they have to remain in front of a computer or behind some books or paper for extended period of time."

"At the secondary level, it's going to be slightly different, we are dealing with adolescent learners, they are little bit older, a little but more mature in most instances and so schools are expected to continue to engage then but while they engage them, they also need to make sure that they too are flexible that they too understand the difficult circumstances that students have to work in and so they need to make sure that if they are going to check for learning and I'm very careful to say, check for learning as opposed to assessment because assessment carries a more formal connotation where there is a grade awarded. So while we want to encourage them to check for learning, that they need to make sure that they do so using flexible means. We're encouraging you to call the Ministry's hotline, so that we can intervene, and we can remind schools what it is they should be doing at this time. What they really should be doing is supporting learning and not enforcing learning."

Home | Archives | Downloads/Podcasts | Advertise | Contact Us

7 News Belize