Parents to receive individualized reports of their children

The Supreme Education Council’s Evaluation Institute, at a press conference today, announced that the results of the Qatar Comprehensive Educational Assessment (QCEA) will be released this month through three major reports - Student Report (individualized reports to students, parents and school), Classroom Report (to teachers teaching the students in 2007), and the National Report, respectively. The Student Report aims to assist parents to track their children’s academic progress, identify the strengths and weaknesses in their performance, which might require remedial help. Parents are advised to read these reports carefully, discuss the findings with their children with an educational attitude, teachers and schools and propose the best ways to enhance their children schooling. Senior staff of the Evaluation Institute attended the meeting, which was held in the SEC’s auditorium.

The student report comprising healthy, rich, reliable, scientific and up-to-date data on student performance, reveals strengths and weaknesses in Arabic, English, Mathematics and Science. The report also suggests corrective remedies based on the assessment findings applied in Qatar. The report is written in a language that can be understood by both the parents and students.

Both the student and classroom reports include scale scores’ results of each individual student belonging to a specific class in 2007. In addition, the report also contains information that determines the students’ achievements in a classroom according to three levels of performance: “Meeting standards,” “Approaching standards” and “Below standards.” These three levels of performance help define the ability of students to grasp the new curriculum standards and can be used to decide on best practices in the classrooms with regard to developing teaching and learning methodologies. It can also allow comparisons of performance results for each student over time.

The National Report has information on the performance of the Independent, the Ministry of Education and private Arabic schools, students categorized by gender and type of school.

“The release of these reports at the individual student level comes in line with the Evaluation Institute’s vision and plans,” said Adel Al Sayed, the director of the Evaluation Institute. “The collection and compilation of these data took two years to

insure the objectivity, credibility, reliability of the result trends. We hope these results will assist in developing and improving student learning and the education system at large.”

“The QCEA results will be disseminated using two methods - scale scores and performance levels method - which represent various achievement levels aligned with the new curriculum standards,” said Dr. Enrique Froemel, the director of the School Assessment Office at the Evaluation Institute. “These methods identify the education system goals, and reflect what the student should know, understand and be able to do in each subject. It also determines what should be taught in every classroom, and the students who achieve these levels will have high competitive advantages over their peers when applying to universities all over the world.” . View the presentation

It is worth noting that the QCEA represents standardized tests that are aligned with the new curriculum standards were administered in March 2006 by the Data Collection and Management Office. Nearly 80,000 students participated in these tests that were conducted under the supervision of the Student Assessment Office.