Schools Put to the Test
Pupils in their penultimate year of school are being tested under an international assessment scheme in which Kyrgyzstan fared badly last time round.
Monday, 6 April, 2009
Schools Put to the Test
Pupils in their penultimate year of school are being tested under an international assessment scheme in which Kyrgyzstan fared badly last time round.
Monday, 6 April, 2009
Last time the PISA tests were done, in 2006, Kyrgyzstan came last among the 57 countries that took part. Those tests were only for mathematics, whereas this time the focus is on reading skills and logical thinking.
“Students have stopped reading books,” said one teacher at a Bishkek school, “so we try to develop their faculty for independent thinking in the classroom.”
However, educational experts argue that Kyrgyzstan falls down when it comes to teaching logical thinking.
Meerim Kadyrova of the Centre for Education and Teaching Methods Assessment says very few teachers encourage pupils to think for themselves and to fully digest information they read. Teachers see their role as simply to impart information.
