Electronic test items bank awaits for teachers in Macedonia

At a time when school assessment is a prevailing issue among education policy makers, it is crucial to find ways for making it less sensitive and sore for teachers, students and parents.
Lately, the image of school-based assessment in primary schools in Macedonia is that teachers are struggling between traditional assessment tools and contemporary assessment methods.
Primary Education Project not only strives to provide teachers’ professional development activities for modern assessment methodology, but also makes efforts to establish instruments and applications that will ease and enhance testing as an assessment tool in schools across the country. 

In that direction, PEP’s school–based assessment component initiated and supported the creation of an electronic test items bank, which was officially promoted on August 24 in Hotel Alexander Palace, Skopje. Over 50 guests, representatives from the State Examination Center (SEC), Bureau for Development of Education, assessment experts and teachers attended this event.

“By establishing the e-test items bank we will raise the quality of student testing and at the same we enabled the continuous on-line support to teachers who can see and comment on the items.  This way, teachers will learn from each other and will make the e-tests item bank self-sustainable.”, pointed USAID Education Office Director, Le Anna Marr. “This would not have been possible without the close cooperation of the Ministry of Education and Science, the Bureau for Development of Education, and especially the State Examination Centre, that will administer and control the quality of the posted test items in the future.” , she also pointed out.

The State Examination Center will administer the e-test item bank. Experts from SEC have access to control the quality of the posted test items and mark quality items as “validated”. This bank will also help the SEC to select good test item authors. The teachers as well as SEC will be able to collect a pool of quality items that can be used for different assessments.

“Creating an objective test is not easy, especially if you don’t know which standards to conform to. That is why I have high expectations from this initiative,” Elena Apostoloska, Math teacher in PS “Zivko Brajkovski”- Skopje.

In addition to the e-test items bank, based on the ideas of PEP SBA experts, the most famous Macedonian cartoonist Darko Markovic (Dar-Mar) developed three short cartoons on quality and fair assessment. They deal with actual issues in the area of school-based assessment in Macedonia. CDs with the cartoons will be distributed to schools and will be broadcasted on national and regional TV programs. We are hoping that this will raise public awareness for quality and ethics in student assessment.

 

Representatives from USAID, PEP, SEC and MCEC at the promotion of the e-test items bank and short movies on quality assessment

Presentation of the electronic test items bank with all its functionalities

Darko Markovic speaks about creating the cartoons which present serious topic such as the assessment is, but in a comical way

The audience enjoyed watching the three short movies created by famous Macedonian cartoonist Dar-Mar

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