MINSK, 11 January (BelTA) – Belarusian school students will participate in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in April-May 2018, BelTA learned from Oksana Kovalkova, a member of the Council of the Republic's permanent commission on education, science, culture, and social development, director of Mozyr Secondary School No. 16.
The pool of participants includes 15-year-old school students. The testing will take place at 150 secondary education institutions in Gomel Oblast alone. The PISA is divided into five sections: popular science with public policy issues, everyday problems, financial literacy, aesthetics, and education-related tasks. “Most of them are logic-oriented. They are designed to assess how students put their knowledge into practice,” Oksana Kovalkova remarked. The test will evaluate the students' performance in mathematics, reading, and science.
Teachers in Mozyr District took the test before they offered it to the children. They also explored Kazakhstan's experience in implementing the PISA. According to Oksana Kovalkova, the school students are to deal with some interesting tasks. In order to do some of them, the children will study diagrams and graphs and answer several questions. Some other tasks are basically mini tests to be done after reading an article from a popular science magazine. The teachers did well on the test. The children's results will be announced in a year. The answers will be checked outside Belarus.
The PISA is mainly designed to assess the practical skills of school students and evaluate how they put their theoretical knowledge into practice, the senator underlined. In her words, great importance is attached to adopting the competency-based education approach in Belarus. This approach is about teaching the students how to put knowledge into action rather than simply acquire it. The updated Education Code is expected to reflect this trend.
