Unesco: Panamanian students struggle to develop ideas in writing

Panama City, 22 Mar Third and sixth graders in Panama find it difficult to develop ideas and maintain consistency when writing a text, according to the results of the Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (ERCE 2019) released this Tuesday by UNESCO. The 2019 ERCE Writing Test also revealed that third and sixth grade students in Panama must improve their vocabulary, and that just over half of them managed to adapt to the purpose they were asked to write about. The UN body explained that the students involved in this study were proposed communicative situations that addressed different genres: in the third grade they were asked for a narrative letter about a trip and a text for the presentation of a dance, while in the sixth grade they were asked for a letter of request and a descriptive text of an animal. non-existent. The following indicators were evaluated: the discursive domain (communicative purpose and appropriateness to the slogan, gender and, in the case of sixth grade, also registration); the textual domain (vocabulary; global coherence, sentence agreement and textual cohesion) and legibility conventions (spelling and punctuation). In general terms, in third grade students from Panama performed better in textual mastery than in discourse. But aspects such as discursive mastery 2 out of 10 third-graders achieved the highest level of performance (category 4) when writing in accordance with the slogan and purpose requested. While in relation to legibility conventions, 4 out of 10 third-graders, both writing a letter and writing a descriptive text, were at the lowest level of performance, that is, they committed punctuation or spelling errors, such as interrupting a sentence with a period followed or not putting a point followed when it was necessary In the case of sixth grade, in the textual domain, 6 out of 10 students wrote a letter without sentence agreement errors, without repeating words and using a variety of vocabulary; 7 out of 10 students developed a cohesive text, and 9 out of 10 students maintained the central theme. Regarding the discursive domain, nearly half of the sixth-graders were unable to adapt to the purpose or genre they were asked to write about. And only 1 in 4 students who developed the descriptive text did not present errors such as interrupting a sentence with a period followed, the absence of a comma in an enumeration and/or the absence of a period followed when necessary. The director of the Regional Office of Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (OREALC/UNESCO Santiago), Claudia Uribe, said that “the delivery of writing results constitutes an important input for pedagogical work.” The ERCE 2019 study, which was applied in 16 countries in the region, “is the most recent large-scale learning assessment, which was implemented just before the massive suspension of face-to-face classes due to the covid-19 pandemic. We hope that the report produced for each country will contribute to the development of this indispensable skill for our students to communicate and be an active part of society,” he added. CHIEF gf/av/rrt