The Curriculum Development Unit (CDU) of the Ministry of Education has finally completed four phases of workshops beginning in May and ended this month in which sixty schools participated.
The workshop was conducted as part of the Fiji Island Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (FILNA) to equip teachers with skills to assist them improve students’ literacy and numeracy competences.
Curriculum and Assessment Officers from the Ministry helped teachers from the selected schools to analyse and update their teaching and assessment methods.
To improve numeracy skills, teachers put children in small groups of the same needs for improvement with hands-on activities where they used simple materials to help them understand the mathematical ideas.
To teach literacy skills, the students also worked in small groups to discuss and plan their ideas and had fun acting out stories while they read them.
Teachers also helped students to organise their ideas in writing.
The other new direction in the trial was that teachers were using classroom based assessment to check on students’ learning.
The whole exercise is under the FILNA Assessment format used to assess class four and class eight work as part of the Ministry of Education’s effort in designing an effective assessment format to replace external examinations.
This format of assessment will be used widely next year when there will be no more Fiji Intermediate Examination (FIE) while the Fiji Eighth Year Examination (FEYE) to be on it last phase.