Girls Outshine Boys in Grade Four Literacy Test

Minister of Education and Youth, Maxine Henry Wilson has raised concern about the low performance of boys in this year’s Grade Four Literacy Test.
Mrs. Henry Wilson, in her contribution to the 2007 /08 Sectoral Debate in the House of Representative yesterday (June 12), said that there was a 23 per cent gap in the performance of girls over the boys.
“What is very disturbing about the results is the gap between the performance of the girls and the boys. The average for the girls is 73.6 per cent and the average for the boys is 51 per cent, a gap of 23 per cent,” she said.
“We have to go behind those figures because this is a trend that is getting to be of much concern,” she noted.
On the positive side however, she informed that 62 per cent of children showed mastery of the test, with regions one, four, six and five all performing “very commendably”.
“We however have concerns about regions two and three,” Mrs. Henry Wilson said, noting that the summer programme will be brought forward from the vacation period to June to facilitate intervention in these regions.
The initiative to move the programme forward, she said, will also “enable the interventions to be more accessible to more students and less burdensome on parents.”