Teachers speak of a “debacle” and say that the poor results cannot be attributed to the pandemic or to instability in schools. School directors regret the delay in releasing the results, which is important for preparing teaching strategies. There is content with less than 3% positive.
It was in May and June of the 2022-2023 school year that students in the 2nd, 5th and 8th grades took their assessment tests, for the first time in digital format. The grades, to which DN had access, arrived at the schools on the 15th. The timing was criticized by the school principals who have now been confronted with results that, at first glance, were considered “disastrous”.
“The tests are important for gauging learning and readjusting plans for students. I understand the delay due to the correction strikes, but ideally schools should have started working on the results at least in September. We would certainly have had strategies in place by then,” says Filinto Lima, president of the National Association of Directors of Public Schools (ANDAEP).
And it is this delay that has not allowed for a more in-depth analysis by the schools, something that should happen at the beginning of 2024, at the school’s Pedagogical Council meetings. “The release of the results coincided with the time of the school evaluation meetings. That’s why we can’t work on them until January. Ideally, they should have been released in July, giving us room to plan for the following school year. This way, we’ll have to make adjustments in the middle of the school year,” he explains.
Arlindo Ferreira, director of the Cego do Maio school group and author of the ArLindo blog (one of the most read in the education sector) shares the same opinion. “It’s too late considering that learning should be prepared at the beginning of the year,” he says.
Paulo Guinote, a 2nd cycle History and Geography of Portugal (HGP) teacher (one of the subjects subject to examination) considers the results “disastrous from any perspective”. “There is no other way to present or analyze them, no matter how much you try to twist the evidence,” he says. For the teacher, “the reasons for the debacle cannot be attributed to the usual suspects for the Ministry of Education: the pandemic or instability in schools”.
“In the case of the pandemic, it’s not possible to attribute a large share of responsibility to it if the knowledge measured refers to content from the school year itself, as in the case of History and Geography of Portugal, or to immediately previous years, as in Natural Sciences and Physical Chemistry. Perhaps in Portuguese or Mathematics we can talk about the more cumulative aspect of competences, but that can’t explain everything. As for instability in schools, the minister repeated a month ago that the strikes had a residual impact,” he explains.
Paulo Guinote attributed the poor results at national level to the fact that students already know “the vices of the model”. “First of all, they know that these tests serve absolutely no purpose in their school career and their commitment is very low, something that I observed directly (and was told to me by many colleagues) when monitoring one of the 8th grade tests, during which half of the students did little more than sign their names. This model of measuring learning is inconsequential and only wastes time and resources,” he warns. The teacher also believes that cutting teaching time in “traditional” subjects has led to a “minimalist approach to content”, making teaching content in a more consistent and coherent way “very complicated”. As an example, Paulo Guinote explains that the HGP subject, which has lost two hours a week, involves a more superficial approach to the subjects. “The result is that we have between 5% and 15% of students being able to answer anything in the assessment tests,” he concludes.
The teacher also criticizes the application of the tests in digital format “when the means are not indispensable for carrying them out smoothly for the students in the first place”. He also recalls problems on the days the exams were held, such as the poor network connection and the time taken to get used to the scenarios, which “were far from being the minimum necessary”. Looking at the results of the Information and Communication Technologies exam, Paulo Guinote considers it to be “really bad” that “only around 20% of students were able to carry out tasks such as investigating and researching”.
In his overall analysis of the results of the 5th and 8th grade tests, the teacher says they are even more worrying than those of the PISA test. “What the overall results of this test reveal – more dramatically than the PISA tests – is that the last few years have been a rhetorical construction of an inclusive, flexible, equitable education that has led the majority of students in public schools down an alley from which they urgently need to be removed,” he concludes, adding that “this performance clashes head-on with the ‘success’ results of the internal assessment.”
Poor results in 2nd grade
Alberto Veronesi, a primary school teacher, is adamant: “The results are bad”. “The results of the 2nd grade assessment tests, which were carried out in digital format for the first time, are in and there are no surprises. They’re bad! When it’s only in art education that we can find areas where the majority of students ‘got it’, we have to admit that we’re doing badly,” he says.
Declaring himself against the assessment tests, he regrets the late release of the results, which made their analysis “unfeasible”. But the justification for the “bad results”, in his opinion, is not just the fact that they were done on a computer. “It has harmed performance, as several teachers have said, but the main causes of these results are the lowering of the bar in internal assessments, the almost obligatory passing, whether they know it or not, in the case of 2nd grade, even reading. We should all be more demanding, even if we know that the pressure from the tutelage to get all the students through is enormous,” he explains. Alberto Verenosi regrets the Tutela’s silence on the issue and calls for changes.
“We must refocus our thinking and draw inspiration from the classical foundations of education, defending rigor, demand and discipline as the primary foundations of the education system and if we want to return to levels of learning that we can be proud of, it is essential that we return to the core of education: knowledge. School should be a place where knowledge is transmitted and assessed effectively. Having abandoned this purpose has brought us poor results,” he concludes.
Contacted by DN, the Ministry of Education asked for explanations at a later date. “The report with the overall results will be published soon,” replied the ME’s adviser.
There are subjects where more than half the students failed
2nd grade
Students were tested on their knowledge of Portuguese, Mathematics, Environmental Studies, Art Education and Physical Education. Only in Art Education did the students meet the objectives, with the majority of the parameters rated “Achieved”. In Portuguese, “Orality” was the area with the best results, with 48.1% of students managing to complete the tasks. No other parameter was more than 20% positive. In Grammar, 36.6% were unable to complete the tasks. In mathematics, the scenario is much the same, with no positive results in any area.
5th grade
In Portuguese, only 14.2% of students showed no difficulties in “Orality”, 5.2% in “Reading”, 8.7% in “Grammar” and 17.4% in “Writing”. In HGP, the results were weaker. Three contents were assessed and none of them had a positive average, with positive percentages of less than 3% at national level. For example, in Location and the Natural Framework of the Iberian Peninsula (HGP), 66.6% of students were unable to answer the questions correctly. Physical Education is the only subject with positive results.
8th grade
The 8th graders took tests in Mathematics, Natural Science, Physics and Chemistry (FQ) and ICT. The number of students with difficulties was higher than 50% in almost all the areas assessed in Science and Chemistry. Similar results were achieved in Mathematics, where only the “Organization and processing of data” parameter had around 20% positive results. In ICT, the percentage of students who failed to reach the targets or who showed difficulties was also high.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)