Couple articles on GSAT

[Wahalla]

Parts of GSAT could wait until high school, says educator
BY LUKE DOUGLAS Obserevr senior reporter [email protected]
Wednesday, June 27, 2012




FORMER education officer in the Ministry of Education Rev Charles Danvers agrees that some parts of the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) curriculum could be introduced to students at the secondary level instead.
He, however, does not concur with Education Minister Rev Ronald Thwaites' view that much of the material in the controversial examination is useless and does not test how well students will do in high school.
DANVERS… GSAT takes into consideration the entire primary curriculum (Observer file photo)
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Commenting on whether the material in the GSAT was appropriate for the students, Rev Danvers said that may be so in some cases. "... For example, some for the concepts they do in science and so on; in some instances the extent to which it goes... could be left for high school," he said shortly after this week's Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange at the newspaper's headquarters at Beechwood Avenue in Kingston.
Speaking in Parliament last Tuesday on the release of the GSAT results, Thwaites called the exam "the apartheid of the education system". He said the GSAT robbed children of extra-curricular activities and was "cramming their heads with excess material that they will never use and which is no real test of their ability or their aptitude for high school".
Added Rev Danvers: "I don't know that there is information (in GSAT) that they will never use, because no information is ever lost. But some of it you could probably not go into that kind of depth. So I wouldn't necessarily say you would never use it, but you may not find it applicable to the child for future learning immediately."
Rev Danvers stressed that the GSAT takes into consideration the entire primary curriculum, especially from grades four to six, but also involving material from grade one.
He noted that the pressure for children to be placed in particular high schools was a legacy from the Common Entrance Examination which was abolished in 1998. "Part of this thing about pressure is a legacy from Common Entrance, because then we used to have Common Entrance factories. Now what we have are GSAT factories," he said.


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[Wahalla]

Re: Couple articles on GSAT

The designers claims it was not for placement.. what did he think it was for ???? To exist in a vaccum????

GSAT designer says advice was not followed
BY HG HELPS Editor-at-Large [email protected]
Tuesday, June 26, 2012




THE man who designed the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) is insisting that if education policymakers had followed the original plan under which the test should have been implemented, there would be less fuss about it now.
Dr Fitz Russell, retired regional director in the Ministry of Education and the first co-ordinator of the National Assessment Programme (NAP), said that advice against using the GSAT as a placement for students moving up to the secondary education level was ignored.
RUSSELL... we wanted a test that was fit for purpose, that would do the job to evaluate children’s learning (Photo: Naphtali Junior)
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The veteran educator, who was a guest at the weekly Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange at the newspaper's Beechwood Avenue headquarters yesterday, said that the political administration of the 1990s went ahead and introduced the GSAT in a way that it was not intended.
"We wanted a test that was fit for purpose, that would do the job to evaluate children's learning, to allow us to give feedback to teachers. It was never about placement," Dr Russell said.
"The issue of placement is the issue of economics, policy and politics. We had given the best advice in terms of how to produce a cohort of children, who had achieved your objectives for primary and would benefit maximally from secondary. We were not seeking to solve the minister's problem, and the planning functions problem," he told editors and reporters.
The GSAT project was worked on between 1988 and 1998 when the Ministry of Education decided to go fully into it as the method of placing students into secondary schools. It was introduced for the first time in 1999.
"In 1988, we started work and shortly after, then Minister of Education Dr Neville Gallimore went somewhere and made the announcement that the GSAT was going to be used for placement.
"At that time, we had not even done the first trial and I went to the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education, Cecil Turner, and told him that I had noticed the report and told him that it was not good advice, because we did not know how the test would function, and we did not know how the items would function," Dr Russell said.
"I said at the time that to make certain decisions about children and their future would be a wrong and invalid use of this test. He (Turner) said I would have to go to the minister and convince him. We had a meeting and talked about it and then I went to Minister Gallimore and spoke about it. To his credit, I never heard anything else about it until he left office in 1989," Dr Russell stated.
However, by 1992, the new government had started to speed up plans to replace the Common Entrance, which started in 1958, with the GSAT as both an assessment and placement-based examination, despite the objection of Dr Russell and some of his technical colleagues.
"By the 1990s, the GSAT fell right into the plans of then Education Minister Carlyle Dunkley and his State Minister Burchell Whiteman. We did object, but you can object so much and no more," Dr Russell said.
"The Common Entrance was an age-based exam, the GSAT was curriculum-based.
"One of the problems you had with the Common Entrance Exam was as soon as you reached a certain age you could take it.
"Approximately half of the children were getting placed from grade five, 20 per cent from grade four and 30 per cent from grade six. You therefore take out the brighter children at grade four, but the implication is that you skip two years of critical information in Mathematics, because how the curriculum was structured then, place value was taught in grade five for the first time, so a child was leaving primary school without learning place value. Is it any wonder that at the high schools, that was the biggest problem that people faced?" he asked.
"If you have not mastered the concept of place value, there is very little else you can do or learn in Mathematics. This was one of the advantages of being curriculum-based and everybody going up to grade six.
"If you go to grade six, then you have a better chance of learning all the concepts in Math, English and so on and you are more likely to do well, just by virtue of the fact that you have been introduced to these concepts right through," Dr Russell said.


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