Monitoring Student Progress in Reading
In the Flemish community, education is explicitly regarded as more than training and instruction. In addition to instructional content, a school also must convey values, attitudes, and convictions to its (freely specified) pedagogical framework. This often leads to outcomes that do not easily lend themselves to exact measurement. For this reason, there are no externally imposed tests and no national examinations.
The freedom of education in Belgium includes the autonomy of Flemish schools in choosing instructional methods and subsequently in testing their students. Nevertheless, the standards and the procedure for the assignment of a primary school certificate are laid out in the education legislation. At the end of elementary education, the class council autonomously decides whether a certificate of primary education will be issued. The class council judges whether students have reached and mastered the attainment targets for primary education. The Ministry has provided on its website an overview of “tests for schools” to support schools in making these determinations. Three types of tests have been available on this website since 2009:
- The Flemish version of the student monitoring system of the Dutch organization CITO (Centraal Instituut voor Toetsontwikkeling, or the Central Institute for Assessment Development), including tests of language and technical reading
- The Start of Primary Education Linguistic Skills Screening test (known by its Dutch acronym, SALTO), a listening test to screen the Dutch language proficiency of students starting their first grade of primary education
- The parallel tests developed by the Flemish Ministry within the framework of the periodical survey on final objectives and development objectives, including a parallel test for Dutch reading
The schools decide whether students have attained the final objectives of the core curriculum. Most teachers use tests linked to a series of textbooks and/or develop their own tests. On a more objective level, most schools also use standardized tests for technical reading and reading comprehension. Additionally, a follow-up system is applied independently from the series of textbooks in use to verify student achievement level or learning gains. Students and their parents are regularly informed about results, progress, learning behavior, and personal development through written school reports.
Many schools also use a test that includes reading at the end of Grade 4 or 6, provided by an educational association of schools. Thus, individual teachers and school teams receive external data of the achievements of their pupils. They confront these data with their own results to obtain a more objective assessment. School teams also can use the data from these assessments to control the effects of their education.
Since 2002, systematic surveys have been organized to enable authorities to get an overview of the quality of the Flemish education system based on reliable and objective student performance data. In 2002, 2007, and 2013, the review focused on reading. The results of the latest survey were reassuring: 91 percent of Flemish students succeeded in acquiring the learning outcomes for reading in 2013. Nevertheless, when considering that 2 or 3 percent of a birth cohort goes directly from Grade 5 or even 4 to a secondary school and that many students go to special education schools and in many cases do not meet the attainment targets, this result is perhaps not reassuring at all. A parallel test of this survey is available for schools to use for internal quality management, but the test is not suited for the assessment of individual students.