Students in Paraguay achieved an appropriate development of their texts, but they must improve their discursive domain and work on punctuation, according to the Writing test of the Comparative and Explanatory Regional Study (ERCE 2019).
Source: EFE
The evaluation, applied to third and sixth grade students, revealed that the participants “wrote without repeating words” and kept developing the ideas in their texts.
The results of the study were released this Tuesday by the Regional Office of Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (Orealc/Unesco Santiago) together with the representatives of the 16 countries that were part of the investigation.
The test revealed that third graders need to better fit the genre they are asked to write about and work on punctuation, the agency said in a statement.
While the sixth graders, according to the results, must improve agreement within sentences.
“The development of high levels of competence in writing is an imperative for all educational systems,” said the director of Orealc/Unesco Santiago, Claudia Uribe, quoted in the note.
In addition to Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay participated in the measurement.
As part of the assessment, third grade students were asked to write a narrative letter about a trip and an introductory text about a dance.
For sixth graders, the test consisted of writing a request letter and a descriptive text of a non-existent animal.
The evaluators analyzed three aspects: discursive domain, textual domain and legibility conventions.
The third grade students who participated for Paraguay “had difficulty adapting to the purpose they were asked to write about” and only about 25% managed to adapt to the required genre.
For sixth graders, “almost half of the students made punctuation errors and 1 in 3 students did not use punctuation in their writing.”
