The Pacific Community's education division will conduct its in-country presentations on the Pacific Islands Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (PILNA) 2018 to Kiribati and Tonga's ministry of education.
The comprehensive discussions, led by a representative from SPC's Educational Quality and Assessment Programme (EQAP), will focus on the PILNA 2018 Regional Report and the respective country reports.
These engagements are similarly being conducted with the education systems of the other 13 island countries that participated in the only regional longitudinal research on literacy and numeracy in the Pacific.
The 2018 research was led by EQAP in a partnership model that includes the support of the Australian and New Zealand governments, the 15 countries' education systems and the Australian Centre for Educational Research (ACER).
The engagement is a three-day exercise that begins with presentations to the education systems' top managers, then to respective curriculum and assessment divisions. The final leg of the exercise is a presentation to teachers, and workshops that will dig deeper into the findings with the aim of improving teachers' classroom assessments.
The in-person presentations and workshops are to ensure countries fully understand the trends that have persisted from the previous studies, and the new findings that are specific to the region and their own education system. These engagements are to assist education leaders to be confident in using the findings to make informed decisions, and to mine the rich data gleaned from the research. It is envisaged that this will also help in the administration of an improved PILNA when the new cycle begins.
EQAP's in-country familiarisation exercise will conclude next month.