Starting next year, grade three students will be assessed by the Bhutan Council for School Examinations and Assessment (BCSEA). The National Education Assessment (NEA) will be assessed through a survey. The assessment will be conducted in a three-year cycle and will extend the assessment to grade six and nine in the latter cycle.
Such NEA will investigate and monitor the health of the education system in the country. To further guide the assessment, the NEA Framework was launched today.
The framework has comprehensive guidelines for the conduct of NEA at grades three, six and nine. It will guide to conduct a systematic and periodic national assessment of education in Bhutan.
“For the first time in our history, we are coming out with a robust national assessment framework that will help us to conduct a systematic assessment and help in getting data which will infer the policymaking process in the system,” said Arjun Kumar Gurung, the Principal Education Monitoring Officer with the BCSEA.
BCSEA officials said the assessments of grade three, six and nine will be on the cognitive domains that include English Reading and Writing Literacy, Dzongkha Reading and Wring Literacy, Mathematical Literacy and Scientific Literacy. The students will also be assessed on the values and attitudes, and 21st-century competencies. To make it more inclusive, children with disabilities will also be assessed.
According to the officials, the assessment of the three-year cycle will ensure that the gap between the grades will be as same as the number of years of interval in each cycle.
“We will be tracking the first cohort in 2021. And in 2024, we will track the cohort of grade three as well as the grade six. So basically, every three years, we will be tracking the new cohort as well as the same cohort over a period of three years. So this means we are monitoring the growth of children across the grade as well as the growth of children over the grades,” he added.
He added, as per the initial NEA project, the first round of the NEA at grade three was scheduled for 2020. However, it has been deferred to 2021 due to the current pandemic.
Kinley Dem
