New office to manage academic performance

 ACADEMIC performance and standards of primary and elementary students in Rabaul district will now have a separate office for monitoring and evaluation purposes.

The Rabaul District Development Authority board chairman and MP Dr Allan Marat recently endorsed K250,000 to establish a unit at the district level specifically to cater for assessment benchmarking examinations programmes.

Benchmarking examinations were introduced into all elementary and primary schools in the district last year where students from elementary prep to Grade 7 sat for the examinations during the week-long national Grade 8 examination week.

District standards officer John Theo said benchmarking examinations were tried last year and proved to be a success hence the need to set up a management programme.

Theo said since the Grade 8 and Grade 10 exams will be phased out this year, Rabaul has taken the initiative to continue conducting it in a bid to ensure students have an examination to test their knowledge on subjects taught in the year.

He stressed that the concept is in line with the standard based curriculum which allows teachers to use the results of the exam to modify their instructions as required to prepare students for end of year standardised achievement tests.

“Benchmarking is a standard against which something can be measured or assessed and a bench marking test brings accountability to schools by measuring students against quantifiable standards,” Theo said.

He said the concept is similar to the Pacific Island Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (PILNA) which are being used to measure literacy and numeracy levels in the Pacific as in international benchmarking and also curriculum standards monitoring tests used to measure literacy and numeracy levels in PNG.

Schools in Rabaul have come up with an assessment committee comprising teachers from all clusters both in primary and elementary.

An assessment policy has been drafted by the committee to guide planning of the concept.