BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – EIGHTY percent of Kittitian children and 89 percent of Nevisian children in primary schools are reading at acceptable levels, according to an assessment undertaken by the Ministry of Education.
Additionally, 4.5 percent of St. Kitts students and 1.2 percent of Nevis students are unable to read. Their main areas of weakness are in phonics, reading fluency and reading comprehension.
Those are the results of an OAS-sponsored Reading Assessment Project conducted by the Curriculum Development Unit. The reading skills of 3 342 Kittitian students and 1 216 of their Nevisian counterparts were evaluated via the MICO Reading Test, a Caribbean-based diagnostic tool designed for primary school pupils.
The test was developed by the MICO College Child Assessment and Research in Education Centre in Kingston, Jamaica.
In its 2009 White Paper on Education Policy and Development, the Ministry of Education set a goal that 95 percent of primary school students should be able to read at the required levels by 2014.
Although results failed to reach that target, Permanent Secretary Osmond Petty said the ministry was still “hopeful” of attaining that objective, and explained the disparity between the Kittitian and Nevisian statistics.
“Ninety-five percent by 2014 is not an unrealistic goal. The illiteracy numbers were less than five percent on each island, so it shows that around 95 percent of our students can read, it’s just that all of them are not reading at an acceptable standard,” he noted.
“The nine percent difference between the two islands is not significant. Many more students were tested in St. Kitts because of the larger number of schools, so obviously there would be more students who were not at the appropriate level,” he added.
Starret Greene, OAS Ambassador to St. Kitts-Nevis, revealed that a number of recommendations were drawn from the evaluation, which the ministry had committed to actively pursue.
“These measures include creating intervention programmes for struggling readers, increasing the monitoring of teachers with responsibility for teaching reading and evaluating existing reading programmes to ensure they are effectively implemented and updated,” Greene said.
Greene said another consideration was the training of a national in post-graduate reading studies, who would then return to the Federation to train and supervise reading teachers.
He also disclosed that each primary school was in possession of at least one MICO Diagnostic Reading Kit in order to facilitate regular assessment of pupils’ reading.
