MINISTER of state in the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information Floyd Green informed the House of Representatives Tuesday that there was no mock Primary Exit Profile (PEP) examination.

“There was a mock performance task examination, which is only one component of the primary exit profile examination,” Green said, as he answered questions which had been tabled by Opposition MP and former minister of education Ronald Thwaites.

“… It is important to make that distinction because oftentimes when we speak about the mock, we speak about it as if the entire exam was a mock examination and, as such, we extrapolate from the performance in one specific area and we give that to say whether we think the children will do well or not,” he noted.

He said that the grade five pilot performance task, which was administered on June 18 and 19 this year in mathematics, language arts, social studies and science was only one component of the overall PEP assessment, and the mock exam was administered for the primary purpose of assessing the system in terms of its readiness for PEP.

He pointed out that the areas assessed were: general readiness of the students, in terms of attempts and responses to questions; the general approach of teachers in preparing the students; the conduct of the performance task; as well as the ministry’s readiness in terms of the marking of papers that focus on different types of items.

In responding to the questions tabled by Thwaites, Green said that a total of 37,539 students sat the examination, with the overall result per subject separated into regions for which he provided a table.

He said that the performance task only represented 20 per cent of the evaluation of the total examination and therefore, could not be used to determine the student’s overall performance.

The students, he said, also have a curriculum-based test and a “mental ability” test, adding that the curriculum base was 50 per cent of the overall mark; mental ability was 30 per cent and performance task was 20 per cent.

He said that the performance task only assessed the student’s ability to strategically think and to do extended thinking.

“This means, therefore, that attempts are being made to test specific parts of the brain to see how the students are able to think, Green said, pointing out that this was necessary for the ministry to ascertain where the student is in order to provide support to move them to another level.

“This is to see where the students were in relation to strategic and extended thinking. The current set of grade six students were in grade four in 2016 and, of such, started with the national standards curriculum and the Administration decided to do a pilot assessment, which is the mock performance task.

“So, in other words, this was not a part of the original programme for the primary exit profile. We decided to put in the mock performance task to do what I have already said, which is to test the system,” he noted.

Green said that it should be noted that PEP was originally slated to be rolled out in 2016/17, but the incoming government had made the determination that it would need to do a number of things before its roll out in 2019.

He said that in terms of the performance of students in the performance task examination, 12,003 students mastered language arts, and 22,759 nearly met the mastery standard.

In mathematics, 1,379 students met the standard, while 17,568 nearly met the standard. In science 585 students met the standard, and 14,126 nearly met the standards. In social studies, 2,861 met the standard, while 19,464 nearly met the standards.

He said that students from private and public primary schools did not perform equally well but it has long been the case that students in private institutions, on average, perform better than those in public educational institutions.

“In fact, part of the research driving the implementation of the national standards curriculum and the primary exit profile, is a realisation that in a lot of our private schools they were adhering to the four core principles of the national standards curriculum in relation to their education direction of the children,” Green noted.

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