Education Minister Octavia Alfred has said that one of the concerns related to students’ performance is the fact that girls are accepting and handling the school curriculum better than boys.
The Minister’s statement was made in the context of the recent announcement of the Grade Six National Assessment results which revealed that Dominican female students continue to greatly outperform the male students.
“One of the lingering concerns related to students’ performance remains the fact that girls are accepting and handling the school curriculum better than boys,” Alfred remarked during a press conference last week. “In recognition [of] its continuing challenge, the Ministry of Education remains committed to [continue] training teachers to respond to the challenge of tailoring instructions which can reach our boys and trigger greater interest in learning.”
According to the minister, the ministry is well aware that staff motivation plays a pivotal role in effective teaching.
“It is partly for this reason that the Government of Dominica invested heavily in improving human resources at the secondary level through the creation of senior level positions at our public secondary schools,” she explained.
Alfred went on to state that this decision has significantly assisted in improving the management structure and classroom supervision at our public secondary schools.
She went on to say that students have demonstrated a remarkable degree of resilience as they responded to the challenges of Covid-19 and she is of the view that online learning has solidified their place in history as the true internet generation.
She reassured the public that the Ministry of Education has taken steps to guarantee that technology remains an integral part of students’ learning even while they are engaged face-to-face.
Alfred referred to the results of the 2022 examination [G6NA] which, according to her, showed a slight improvement in some subject areas and a slight decrease in others.
“Generally,” she said. “There was a recognizable impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on students’ performances, however, the performance decline represented only a few percentage points in the subject impacted as compared to previous years.”
She said the ministry is in an advanced stage of reviewing the primary school structure which will include early childhood educators.
Meantime, Senior Education Officer for Curriculum, Measurement, and Evaluation Robert Guiste who presented an analysis of the results, said that after doing a comparison over the last five years, beginning two years before Covid-19 where one paper was used for science and social studies, “we observed in 2021, where we had a full year of school, the results [were] better than all the other years.”
He said also that when comparing the distribution of the grades in Language Arts, 160 girls received A’s and B’s as compared to 100 boys.
“And when we look at the other end, we have 69 of the girls getting D’s and E’s as opposed to 130 of the boys getting D’s and E’s,” Guiste stated. “We need to do something about that.”
He continued, “Same thing for Mathematics, so in every area, the girls continue to outperform the boys.”
According to the Education official, the situation is much the same island-wide except for one district.
“We see that in every area, we have three times the number of boys underperforming, except in the northern district you had more boys outperforming the girls in Language Arts.”
“Almost everywhere else, the girls are outperforming the boys and overall, we have about two to three times more boys in that category,” Guiste revealed.
What you do need to do something about is getting away from exam/rote centered learning and assessment. It is at least eighty years out of date.
Perhaps the boys perceive this better than the girls, and hence their disinterest.