MORE than 40 educators from nine traditional high schools in Kingston are today expected to benefit from a workshop on assessing students in mathematics and science.

The participating institutions are the American International School of Kingston, Campion College, Immaculate Conception High, St Andrew High School for girls, St George’s College, St Jago High and Wolmer’s Boys & Wolmers’ Girls schools – in addition to host, Hillel Academy.

The workshop, which is being offered free of cost, will begin at 4:00 pm at Hillel’s campus. It is to be led by Dr Erin Furtak, an assistant professor of education specialising in science at the University of Colorado. Furtak is also author of the book Formative Assessment for Secondary Science Teachers.

The workshop comes at a time when Jamaica is grappling with low scores of students in mathematics and science at the secondary level. Hillel said it was for this reason that it had chosen to focus on those subject areas.

“Those are two areas (math and science) that very frequently are difficult for students. People then say: ‘Well, they are talented’ or ‘Well, they are not talented’. We believe that these are skills that can be taught and so we wanted to provide the best brain research information possible for our teachers about how children learn in these areas,” said the school’s director, Peggy Bleyberg.

The workshop, which is the second in a series being conducted by Furtak, also forms a part of Hillel’s ongoing community outreach efforts.

“We have a commitment to community service at this school. This is an extension of what we have already been doing at the school,” Bleyberg said, adding that the workshop was a chance to share some of the knowledge they had about education development with other schools.

“We had been talking for quite some time about reaching out to the community to help foster more advanced development in education that we know about from the two new international programmes that we have adopted,” she said.

The programmes are the Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma. IGSEC exams (the equivalent to the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams) are offered in a variety of subject areas, including physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography, economics, business, tourism, French, Spanish, English, mathematics and art at Hillel. Students there can do up to 10 of these subjects, although eight is the recommended number.

The IB Diploma is a two-year programme that targets students aged 16 to 19 years old, and leads to a qualification recognised by leading universities the world over. At Hillel, students in the programme (which is equivalent to A-levels or CAPE) do six subjects across three core areas – extended essay; theory of knowledge; as well as creativity, action and (150 hours of) community service.

Meanwhile, Bleyberg declined to say how much it was costing the school to bring Furtak to Jamaica, saying only that they were paying the assistant professor’s airfare and accommodations.

“She is very fond of Jamaica so she is very happy to do what she can. She is also very fond of Hillel,” the director said.

Furtak was in Jamaica in February when she conducted a workshop on assessment skills and curriculum writing. Twenty teachers benefited from that workshop.

Following this second workshop, Furtak will return to the island later this year to conduct a third session on differentiative instruction. That workshop, according to Bleyberg, is to equip educators to help students in the same classroom who have different learning abilities and styles.