The majority of Argentine third and sixth grade students evaluated in writing by the Comparative and Explanatory Regional Study (ERCE 2019) presented this Tuesday achieved high performances in vocabulary and coherence of his texts, although the need to improve spelling and punctuation was evident.
The report, carried out in 2019 by the Latin American Laboratory for the Evaluation of the Quality of Education (Llece), of the Regional Office of Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (Orealc/Unesco Santiago), evaluated 160,000 third and sixth grade students from 16 countries in the region.
The study, presented this afternoon virtually, did not make comparisons between the different nations, but instead issued a report for each one “since the test correction process was carried out in each country and the results were not calibrated between countries”.
Third grade assessment
for evaluation Two slogans were issued to third graders: write a letter to a friend on the occasion of a trip and describe a typical dance from their country and were graded with marks ranging from 1, the least successful, to 4, the one that met all the requested requirements.
In view of the first proposal, “83% of the students” in third grade provided “a valid answer (2, 3 and 4), since they write the letter focusing on the topic that is requested,” the document stated, noting that in this instance “the 45 percent” also managed to “include in their text an initial and a final situation, which corresponds to category 4, with the highest performance”.
As to the second prompt, 63.2% of the students are located in categories 2, 3 and 4, “because they write the text focusing on presenting a topic”, of which “only those who are located in categories 3 and 4 make the presentation of a dance (35.1%), according to what has been requested in the slogan”.
In addition to the speech domain assessment (communicative purpose and adaptation to the slogan), the “textual domain (vocabulary; global coherence, sentence agreement and textual cohesion) and legibility conventions (spelling and punctuation)”.
More than 92 percent of third graders scored the highest grade for textual proficiency in what refers to the precision and variety of vocabulary, and eight out of ten exceeded with the same note the global coherence in their compositions.
As for spelling and punctuation, only 40 percent achieved the highest score.
How do third and sixth grade students write in Latin America and the Caribbean?
The results of the Writing evaluation of the Comparative and Explanatory Regional Study (ERCE 2019) are now available.
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sixth grade report
In sixth grade, the evaluators asked the students write a petition letter and a text that describes a non-existent animaland the results were similar to third grade students, with a correct discursive domain in more than 70 percent, of which 50 reached the maximum category.
As for the textual domain of the sixth grade children, “87.2% wrote the letter to the authority without repetitions or inaccuracies (category 4 of the rubric)” and “in the writing of the descriptive text of an animal, 80.5”.
Likewise, “more than 95% were able to maintain the central theme of the writing (global coherence)” and regarding legibility conventions (spelling and punctuation), “more than 25% of the student body made more than one spelling error in their texts” .
During the presentation, Claudia Uribe, director of Orealc/Unesco Santiagoassured that “writing is a highly demanding competence at a cognitive level and, unlike oral language, it does not develop naturally in most people” and currently, “it is one of the most demanded competences in the work environment, being critical for good performance in multiple trades and professions”.
“That is why it must be taught from the earliest levels of the educational process and continue to be practiced and taught intentionally throughout the entire school career,” the specialist emphasized.
“Writing helps to think, to order and transmit ideas, to interact with others indirectly and asynchronously, to communicate and capture thoughts, reflections and learning in a lasting way, among many other functions,” he concluded.
The report submitted was also held in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay with the aim of “being able to provide the teaching staff with strategies that allow them to make a contribution to the teaching of writing”.
