The Pacific Islands Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (PILNA) scoring was held in Palau on November 05-09, 2018.
Ms. Torika Taoi of the Educational Quality and Assessment Program, SPC worked with the Ministry of Education officers to score the student assessments.
The PILNA 2018 was administered to year 4 and 6 students in 15 Pacific Island Forum countries to assess literacy and numeracy knowledge and skills.
The assessment is conducted every three years with oversight and coordination of Educational Quality and Assessment Program of the Pacific Community (EQAP, SPC). The first two editions of PILNA were administered in 2012 and 2015, while the third edition of PILNA was administered in October 2018.
For Palau, PILNA 2018 was administered in 14 public and two private elementary schools on October 17-18, 2018. Also included for administration with the literacy and numeracy assessments were student, teacher, and school principal questionnaires. The responses to the questionnaires provided valuable contextual data on students, teachers, and schools.
The results of student performance in the last two PILNA assessments have been noteworthy, indicating that approximately 90% or more of Palau students perform at or above the Pacific regional literacy and numeracy benchmarks for grades 4 and 6. The results also indicate that Palau students perform better in the literacy assessment when compared with the numeracy assessment. When comparing student performance in the literacy domains, Palau students perform better in reading than writing. Consequently, the Ministry of Education has implemented several intervention strategies in the public elementary schools to improve teaching of literacy and numeracy. These intervention strategies include on-going teacher trainings in early grades literacy, journal writing across all grade levels, concrete-pictorial-abstract method in teaching mathematics, differentiated instruction, open classes, and increasing instructional time for literacy and numeracy classes. (PR)