During the quarantine, 80% of the educational community used a cell phone to teach and receive classes, MINED said.
The Ministry of Education (MINED) will evaluate the impact of covid-19 on the learning of students in the public and private sectors, through a test that will focus on four subjects and with which, in addition, they hope to obtain inputs to improve the blendedness.
The State portfolio reported yesterday that the diagnostic test “Knowing my achievements” will not be mandatory, but they expect 800,000 students from third grade to second year of high school to decide to undergo the evaluation, which will be available online and in print.
In addition to the test, the MINED, with the support of the Fundación Pro Educación de El Salvador (FUNPRES), has prepared a Socio-Emotional Status Questionnaire to explore the mental health of students from fourth grade to first year of high school.
The Minister of Education, Carla Hananía de Varela, explained that the appearance of the coronavirus forced the rapid implementation of mechanisms to guarantee distance education, in a country with a wide digital divide. In El Salvador, only 16.73% of families have a computer and 23.35% have Internet service, according to the 2019 household survey.
Hananía revealed that at a time during the quarantine due to covid-19, 80% of teachers and students used a cell phone to teach and receive classes; and the instant messaging application WhatsApp became the most used platform. He assured that this led them to diversify the options, introducing printed guides and teleclasses.
Now the MINED wants to measure the impact of these dynamics on student learning with “Knowing my achievements”, which will cover the subjects of Language and Literature, Mathematics, Social Studies and Civics, and Science, Health and Environment, but the students they will not receive a rating, clarified the official source.
The evaluation will be available on the platform evaluations.edu.sv. MINED has also printed booklets for some 250,000 students who, according to its estimates, would not have the resources to take the test online.
To prevent the students who will choose the booklets from crowding into schools, two dates have been defined for each educational level (see table). The first day will be dedicated to the socio-emotional questionnaire, Social Studies and Science. The second day will be for Language Arts and Math.
The virtual test will be available throughout the day on the platform, according to the grade that corresponds to the student. In the case of the booklets, the students will have one hour to solve each subject and 25 minutes for the socio-emotional questionnaire.
The Ministry of Education did not disclose how much money it has invested in developing this evaluation. The national director of Educational Evaluation, Juan Carlos Fernández, said that printing each booklet will cost $ 0.18 and for the online platform they disburse $ 3,000 per month.
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