Pretoria – Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga has wished all the learners well who will be sitting for the Annual National Assessment (ANA), which starts tomorrow.
More than seven million learners from Grades 1 - 6 and 9 will participate in the ANA in South African public schools and independent schools that qualify for government subsidy.
The assessments are important for the Department of Basic Education, as they are used to gauge the literacy and numeracy skills of learners at the foundation, intermediate and senior phases of the education system.
The ANA results will mainly help to identify areas that need urgent attention so as to improve the learning success levels of pupils.
These results will be used to monitor progress, guide planning and the distribution of resources to help improve the literacy and numeracy skills of learners. ANA will also assist the provincial Education Departments to make informed decisions regarding schools that require extra attention to improve learner performance.
The assessments are not, however, used to determine a child’s progression or promotion to the next grade.
“It is purely to measure the learners’ progress with the curriculum and to establish the level at which they are performing, and the areas of the curriculum that teachers should concentrate on.
“Parents can assist their children by ensuring that they revise all the work done thus far, go through the activities in their workbooks and working through the exemplar tests/questions that have been distributed to schools and are also available on the department’s website,” said Motshekga.
Special attention has been devoted to the development of this year’s Mathematics test for Grade 9 learners. This is to ensure that it serves as an appropriate indicator of learner performance at that level.
“In 2012, the Grade 9 Mathematics performance had been particularly low and this has raised some pertinent questions of Mathematics teaching at this level. We are confident that relevant interventions have taken place and that we will see an improvement in this year’s results,” Motshekga said.
In preparing for the assessment, teachers have been trained to administer the tasks under standardised conditions across all schools and special mechanisms are in place to ensure that the marking by teachers is tightly controlled and quality-assured.
“Sample scripts from every class in each school will be collected and re-marked at a central venue in the province to ensure that school marking is of an appropriate standard,” said the minister.
To further ensure that the results of ANA 2013 are reliable and credible, Motshekga said the department has appointed an independent agent that will conduct the tests at more than 2 000 selected schools across the country.
The tests will be collected and marked by the independent agent and the results from these selected schools will be used to verify both the process and the results obtained from the rest of the country.
South Africa is the only country that administers such a test on an annual basis. Government wants a minimum of 60% of learners to achieve acceptable levels of performance in literacy and numeracy by 2014. This is in keeping with President Jacob Zuma’s directive in his 2010 State of the Nation Address.
Schools can contact the department on the call centre number 0800 202 933 for ANA related queries. – SAnews.gov.za
