Schools should take responsibility for Latvian pupils’ poor academic knowledge because they can notice changes in pupils’ academic accomplishments the fastest, as LETA was told by Zane Oliņa and Pāvels Pestovs, who were previously responsible for the development and implementation of teaching content for School 2030 project.
The question is whether schools have the capacity and how it is possible to improve. Oliņa suggests thinking of ways for schools to bring in capable and well-trained teachers, as well as ways to support them.
New teaching content, including efforts to include all children into the school system was meant to do this. “Everyone should contribute to a good result, not just the ones who directly go through the system,” said Oliņa. She agrees it is “an enormous challenge” to involve each child in accordance to his or her capabilities.
Oliņa mentioned maths as an example – if the way the subject is taught up to 6th grade is not changed, there is a risk of losing “a very large number” of children from 7th grade onward. “They have already convinced themselves they will never learn maths, and they continue using the same simple methods to tackle more and more complex maths problems they have to learn,” says Oliņa.
9th grade maths exam scores and research performed by the Cross-sectoral Innovation Centre of the University of Latvia reveal “noticeable inequality” between municipalities and individual schools within municipalities. In some schools children show very good results in maths while in 3rd grade. By 6th grade, however, only a small number of them maintain good maths scores.
According to Oliņa, the existing inequality means there are no ways to help teachers and schools become better, and “we have already decided in the system them some results will be lower”. Professional support should remain on all three levels, including municipal and school level. The situation could be improved by the initiative by the Ministry of Education and Science to create a methodology centre. This would provide teachers a mechanism and practical aid to help them gain new skills to teach children differently. Everything depends on the practical implementation of this initiative.
Oliņa also says it is necessary to continue working with university researchers to further develop methodology and adopt international experience in Latvia. “We have many proposals, but we have never implemented them to the end,” she said, adding that enormous resources are put into this.
School 2030 representatives do not deny what is proposed by the project can be improved. At the same time, it is necessary to clarify what is needed, not abandon content addition and “start from a blank page”.
Pestovs agrees that the “core” of maths has not changed much even though the focus and order of subjects were switched in the updated content. “The emphasis has shifted from teaching individual skills to reasoning, using elements of mathematics,” he said. He mentioned the project itself has helped create a “very clear” foundation. Nevertheless, practical implementation remains relevant.
When looking at the implementation of new teaching content, it is necessary to keep in mind that for two out of three years children were being taught in the middle of a pandemic – mostly using remote learning tools. Older pupils were affected the most by this. School 2030 representatives expect better results from the upcoming centralised exams.
“Children are back in school after the pandemic, and this should help. Schools are putting in effort as well. It’s not like they’re doing nothing. Results should be better,” Oliņa predicts.
She admits it is difficult to say if scoring thresholds should have been moved forward or not this year. It is necessary to think about this not only in percentage categories, but also in content – the assessment threshold symbolizes a specific set of skills. Without it, the school as a system may not let the child graduate, otherwise he or she will not have mastered the necessary skills to help them later in life.
At the same time, it cannot be said that raising the minimal score threshold could motivate pupils to study harder. “By raising the [scoring] threshold, we are putting greater responsibility on ourselves for pupils. If we’ve made this decision because we understand that we as adults haven’t done all of the homework, then we have to look at who is responsible for that – the pupil that doesn’t study, or us – who failed to guide him or her this far,” said Oliņa.
20% of the content of the exam is devoted to basic skills. If a student scored 10% on the exam, it means that the basic skills have been only partially mastered. According to representatives of “School 2030”, there are various reasons why students do not score even the minimum in exams, for example, the socio-economic status of the family, the support received in previous classes, school attendance, the situation in the family.
School 2030 representatives say there is currently no mechanism to help children who fail to achieve even the minimal score in exams. Repeating a year in the 21st century is an absolutely unacceptable solution, says Oliņa.
One of the solutions could be the proposal from the Ministry of Education and Science to adopt a separate levelling school year for elementary school students who failed exams. If it succeed, it will be “a very strong accomplishment for the system”, because it will be clear what happens to children who fail exams, says Pestovs.
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School 2030 project leaders say poor academic scores of Latvian pupils is the fault of schools
