1,787 Non-Mastery Students Receiving Support at National Summer Academy

Roughly 1,787 students who attained non-mastery in the 2022 Grade Four Literacy Test are benefiting from face-to-face interventions at this year’s National Summer Academy. 

Of this amount, approximately 1,650 students are also engaged in numeracy interventions for the three-week duration of the programme, which runs from July 10 to 27.  

National Literacy Coordinator in the Ministry of Education and Youth, Dr. André Hill, provided the details while speaking with JIS News recently. 

He said the Regional Literacy Coordinators report students turning out at all the designated centres for the literacy intervention.  

Students who have not mastered any of the three areas of the literacy assessment – Reading, Comprehension and Writing Task – are classified as ‘non-mastery’. 

Dr. Hill told JIS News that for the first time, more students are receiving support for underperformance in literacy than for numeracy. 

Assessments were not done in 2020 and 2021 due to disruptions caused by COVID-19. 

“More students failed the Grade Four Literacy Test last year than those who failed the Numeracy Test… .  It’s the first this has ever happened in the history of the execution of those assessments,” he said.  

“We think the pandemic contributed to this anomaly, and so we look forward to the results for this year’s assessment to see if there is any change [and] I expect there will be,” he noted.  

Dr. Hill told JIS News that non-mastery students were assessed before the start of the Summer Academy and were provided with a suite of lessons, which includes word recognition, oral language as well as basic comprehension. 

“We will also have small, group-based activities where students are grouped based on their performance in the literacy and numeracy tests as well as from the screening assessment tools. Of course, there will be all class-based activities where all students are targeted at the same time for instruction,” Dr. Hill said.  

Teachers and literacy specialists engaging these students will record their progress and assess them at the end of the Academy.  

Meanwhile, more than 11,000 students in the ‘almost mastery’ category are being supported online via the Ministry’s website and learning platforms.  

“[This] will see students engaged in self-directed learning tasks and completing questions in the learning kits that would have been uploaded to the platform; accessing videotaped lessons, as well as reading and completing comprehension passages and other related tasks,” Dr. Hill told JIS News.   

As it relates to the numeracy intervention, National Mathematics Coordinator, Dr. Tamika Benjamin, said emphasis is being placed on helping students to understand concepts and focus on number representation, operations and measurements.  

She told JIS News that these areas were noted to be of “greatest need”.  

“We do also have a challenge with algebra but considering the time constraints, we have decided that we will use another strategy to target those students when the new school year begins,” she said.  

The support offered through the National Summer Academy is at no cost to parents and is being delivered by the Ministry’s team of technical officers.