Third and sixth grade students in Panama have difficulty developing their ideas and maintaining internal coherence when writing a text, and they need to improve their vocabulary.
This is revealed by the results of the writing test of the Comparative and Explanatory Regional Study (ERCE-2019), published this week by the United Nations Organization for Culture, Science and Education (Unesco).
According to the results inherent to the discursive mastery indicator, 8 out of 10 students in third grade failed to develop a text that corresponded to the genre of the letter they were asked to write during the test, placing them at the lowest level. performance.
Also, about half of the sixth graders who participated in the evaluation were not able to adapt to the purpose or the genre about which they were asked to write.
10,978 third and sixth grade students participated in the study and three aspects or indicators were evaluated: discursive domain, textual domain and legibility conventions.
The results of the writing test of the Comparative and Explanatory Regional Study, ERCE-2019, of UNESCO, once again confirm the deficiencies presented by students in the country.
The ERCE-2019 is the most recent large-scale learning evaluation in the region, which was implemented just before the massive suspension of face-to-face classes due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In this third installment of the ERCE-2019 results, published on March 22, it is shown that third and sixth grade students find it difficult to develop ideas and maintain consistency when writing a text, and it is indicated that they must improve the richness of your vocabulary.
The results were obtained after the evaluations of the writing test, in which 10,978 third and sixth grade students participated and were asked to write about communicative situations of different genres.
In third grade, students were asked for a narrative letter about a trip and an introductory text for a dance. While in sixth grade they were asked for a petition letter and a descriptive text of a non-existent animal.
Paulina Flotts, executive director of the Measurement Center of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and in charge of the technical implementation of the ERCE-2019 writing test, explained that three aspects or indicators were evaluated in the correction of the test. The first, discursive domain, which includes aspects such as communicative purpose and adaptation to the instruction, gender and, in the case of sixth grade, also register.
The second, textual domain, which includes vocabulary, global coherence, sentence agreement and textual cohesion. And, the third, readability conventions, which includes spelling and punctuation.
