Philippine Basic Education

Religion and science are often in conflict especially when a literal reading of religious text is employed. Take creation versus evolution, for instance. Thus, it is therefore not surprising to see students from countries dominated by religion to score lower in international standardized exams in science. This, in fact, is one of the findings made by a study that looks into the correlation between students' scores in both PISA and TIMSS, and the degree of religiosity of the students' country. Using data from a survey that measures a country's religiosity and scores in the science sections of either PISA or TIMSS, a negative correlation is seen: Above copied from Stoet, G., & Geary, D.C., Students in countries with higher levels of religiosity perform lower in science and mathematics, Intelligence (2017) The correlation seems to stand the test of time. Acknowledging conflicts that exist between science and religion, one may be quick to conclude the mechanism b...

Making inferences is an important part of reading comprehension. An author does not necessarily put everything in print for everyone to read. Yes, you may infer at this moment and extrapolate that doing so requires too many words and simply leads to a wordy or long-winded article. Readers prefer concise sentences. Consequently, as early as the elementary years, students need to be taught to make inferences. Inferences should not be equated to guessing or reading too much between the lines. Extending too much from what is either directly stated or implied in text can be misleading when it comes to reading non fiction especially science literature. Inferences must be based on what one actually has read. Testing for reading comprehension often falls under three categories (Factual Recall, Bridging Inference, Pragmatic Inference) as decsribed in a previous post on this blog, Stress, Working Memory, and Reading Comprehension . As an example, given the following passage: "The waite...

DepEd's K to 12 is like a "band-aid on a gunshot wound". The new curriculum has been designed with short instructional hours to allow for multiple shifts in schools. With shortage in classrooms, squeezing more students into one room is the solution provided by the new curriculum. Incoming education secretary Brione s is correct in stating that major changes have taken place in the past four years in preparation for the new curriculum. Not only are instructional times shorter, but there is also a spiral curriculum implemented in all subjects. Biology, chemistry, physics and earth science are all taught each year in high school. The same goes with mathematics. For these reasons, DepEd's K to 12 is not just a "band-aid on a gunshot wound". Worse, it is an infection on a gunshot wound. It is a wrong solution that will only create new problems. We could only hope that secretary Briones does good with her promise to examine and monitor basic education in the Phi...

Congestion means overcrowding. In simple terms, there is too much in too little space or time. To avoid congestion one can either increase space or time, or reduce whatever is taking space or time. In introducing K to 12 to the Philippines, the Department of Education made the claim, "... the sad state of basic education can be partly attributed to the congested basic education curriculum. " A closer examination of DepEd's K to 12, however, reveals not a decongestion, but a reduction of instructional hours across the first ten years of education. Here are the changes for elementary school: Above copied from K to 12 Toolkit There is a reduction in both languages and mathematics of about 10 percent in instructional time. Below are the changes in secondary school: Above copied from  K to 12 Toolkit Here, the decrease in instructional hours is even greater. Science, for instance suffers a 33 percent reduction. Adding two years to basic education may indeed look ...

The latest report from the OECD, Education at a Glance , released on November 24, 2015, provides data regarding the state of education in various countries. One of the chapters in this report deals with class size and its relationship to learning. The report states, " larger classes are correlated with less time spent on actual teaching and learning and with more time spent on keeping order in the classroom... ...Specifically, one additional student added to an average size class is associated with a 0.5 percentage-point decrease in time spent on teaching and learning activities.... " The following is the figure that captures this finding: Above copied from OECD (2015),  "Indicator D2 What is the Student-Teacher Ratio and How Big are Classes?", in OECD,  Education at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators , OECD Publishing, Paris. DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eag-2015-31-en The Philippines is not included in the above study, but one can extrapolate where Phil...

We all experience "ups" and "downs". It should not be surprising then to see the performance of children in school to fluctuate from time to time. Measuring these changes to extract useful trends requires a good experimental design and statistical analysis. How the working memory works can be measured by tests that require remembering numbers (numerical) or positions of objects (spatial). These tests can be administered at different times of the day over several days and the variations in the scores can then provide a rough sketch of how working memory performance changes with time. Such an experiment has been performed on third and fourth grade students in Germany. The results suggest that mornings are better and that the degree of variation decreases as one goes from third to fourth grade. The study, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology , investigated empirically how working memory performance in both numerical and spatial tasks changes in children...

Actions are supposed to speak louder than words, but words are seen in media much more often. Worse, society with its limited attention span and general lack of critical thinking is now at the mercy of sound bites. What works in education is therefore frequently missed as a careful and thoughtful attention to details is usually absent. Twenty years ago, the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools published a report synthesizing education research to find what it takes to reform schools successfully. The main authors of the report drew the following diagram to highlight what is necessary for improving schools. Above copied from Successful School Restructuring. A Report to the Public and Educators by the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools  Fred M. Newmann and Gary G. Wehlage At the center, the main goal or focus must be student learning. This vision alone, however, is not sufficient. The first layer required to achieve this goal is, of cou...

In the Philippines, these subjects are combined with health to form one learning area called MAPEH  (music, arts, physical education, and health). In Fairfax county in Virginia, music, arts and physical education are called "specials" while health is in a separate subject with science and social studies. The following shows the time allotment in DepEd's K to 12 for the various learning areas: Above copied from DepEd order no. 31, s. 2012 And below is an example of a class schedule in Fairfax county. Above copied from Mason Crest Elementary School

Classroom shortages, lack of learning materials, teacher salaries are all obviously instrumental in basic education. The Department of Education in the Philippines has instead chosen adding years at the end of high school as the most important step in improving the state of basic education in the country. There is no argument that instructional time is a significant factor in education. The graph below from Marcotte and Hansen demonstrates how big the effects are of adding 10 school days to learning outcomes compared to those of other interventions: 10 additional instructional days even work better than having an effective teacher. If just adding ten days is so influential, perhaps adding two years will lead to even greater effects. However, grade retention, also shown in the above graph, adds a year, but its effect is less than the improvement seen with just 10 additional instructional days. Another elephant in the room in terms of education issues becomes obvious with anoth...

There is so much focus on the additional two years at the end of high school that not much attention has been given to the other changes that have been made with the introduction of the new curriculum. One aspect that sets apart Philippine schools from those in other countries is the number of instructional hours intended for the early grades. The following is a chart that shows the number of instructional hours required for the early grades in elementary school: Chart based on OECD Data   At the bottom of this chart is the Philippines. DepEd's K+12 prescribes 240 minutes of instruction per day during the first semester of first grade, 270 minutes per day for the second semester of first grade, and 310 minutes per day for second grade. A school year in the Philippines consists of 200 days. The short instructional hours in the Philippines are in part imposed by shortages in teachers and classrooms, necessitating multiple shifts. There is really no difference between absenteei...

Adding years to basic education is not necessarily a bad idea except for the fact that it lengthens the time a child must be in primary and secondary school before entering higher education. When the number and scope of subjects covered in basic education are simply too much, it is a must to either eliminate some subjects or add years to schooling. Basic education is obviously congested if a child has to be in school from 7 in the morning till 5 in the afternoon. That is a ten-hour school day. Add two hours of commute, a child can possibly spend 12 hours just for school. This cannot be good since an adolescent needs about 9 hours of sleep to remain healthy. Here is a report from the  American Academy of Pediatrics . The main reason why the American Academy of Pediatrics is focusing on the school start time is because of what happens at puberty: Decongesting the curriculum can definitely add flexibility allowing for less hours required to be inside a classroom. And ce...

Troy Zarate de Leon captures a remarkable inconsistency between two news articles concerning Philippine basic education. On one hand, the Philippines has a president recently boasting to the international community that there are no more shortages in public school education. Here is the famous quote: "...Since taking office, our administration has cleared the accumulated backlog in classrooms, books, and chairs, which means that our students can go to school with the minimum expectation that they will have everything they need to succeed....". But reality on the ground is clear: There is at least one high school where there are more than 12,000 pupils assigned to less than 100 classrooms. The situation remains dire that the Department of Education is planning a 3-day school week to address the shortage in schools within Metro Manila. Above captured from Tory Zarate de Leon Facebook page The above is simply a specific instance of the inconsistency of the Philippine gove...

Each hour is 60 minutes. 240 minutes add up to four hours. Devoting one hour for each subject means in a period of four hours, four subjects can be covered. These four subjects can be regarded as the core. Adding other subjects like physical education, recess, and lunch means that even if children begin their schooling as early as 7 in the morning, a school day cannot end before noon. This is one reason why multiple shifts in schools are not good for education. Classrooms are important and this school need must be met as soon as possible before any educational measure is implemented.  Edutopia, What Works in Education , a site of the George Lucas Foundation has been highlighting a middle school in Boston, Massachusetts. The school,  Clarence R. Edwards Middle School , ten years ago was facing the challenges of English language learners and low scores in the state's standard exams in math, English and science. Since 2006, the school added hours to its instructional time in t...

Something is not necessarily better than nothing. This applies to early childhood education. Quality matters. A school environment and culture that fail to stimulate learning leads to a lack of engagement. Lack of engagement leads to an ineffective education. Absences even in preschool and the kindergarten years matter. Attendance in school is the first measure of a student's engagement. Missing even just one out of every ten school sessions can seriously deter learning. This applies not only to high school or the later years of formal schooling. The importance of attendance likewise applies to the early years. The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) has recently published a report illustrating the negative impact of absenteeism in preschool: To view this report, please visit Preschool Attendance in Chicago Public Schools One of the main findings of the report is summarized in the figure below: Above figure copied from Preschool Attendance...

The education chief of the United States of America, Arne Duncan, advocates a later start in the school day: "There’s lots of research and common sense that lots of teens struggle to get up ... to get on the bus." ( "Education Chief: Later Start in School Day Could Help Teens", Philip Elliott, Associated Press ). The school district where I live, Fairfax county, has commissioned the  Children’s National Medical Center’s Division of Sleep Medicine  in June of this year to develop a plan to delay high schools’ start time to 8 am or later. My son, who is now attending an elementary school, gets on the school bus, about 10 minutes before 9 am. His class starts at 9 am. Public high schools in Fairfax currently start at an earlier time, 7:20 am. A later school start of course aims to increase the length of time a child could sleep. This is then followed by the hypothesis that " rested students are ready students ". Secretary of education Arne Duncan adds that th...