Petrina Francis, Staff Reporter

The Education Transformation Team (ETT) is moving to standardise the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) syllabuses to facilitate a better understanding of the subject matter and, ultimately, improve students' performance in the examination.

The Gleaner's Education 2020 editorial project, published on April 8 and which ranks high schools according to their performance in CSEC mathematics and English language examinations in 2006-07, has indicated that several high schools performed poorly. Some schools recorded no passes for either of the two subjects.

Pilot project

Frank Weeple, executive director of the ETT, told The Gleaner yesterday that, in addition to improving literacy and numeracy at the primary level, the team was targeting the upper levels of secondary school.

"We had engaged a successful retired secondary principal who worked with a team to look at the curriculum for grades 10 and 11 and what they were doing was the curricularisation of the CSEC syllabuses and that work has now been done and we are now going to be rolling that out and piloting it in secondary schools," Weeple disclosed.

He added: "There was a strong feeling that, at the CSEC level, the way teaching was happening was very much teaching for the exam syllabus and we wanted to give a much more coherent approach to curriculum and teaching in grades 10 and 11."

Scope and sequence

Standardisation of the syllabuses will ensure that they provide scope and sequence and facilitate a better understanding of the areas covered.

Under the curricularisation, the teachers will get suggested teaching methods, homework, marking schemes, among other things. The subjects that have been standardised are English language, English literature, chemistry, physics, biology, technical drawing, information technology and Spanish. Mathematics is also expected to be curricularised.

petrina.francis@gleanerjm.com