Enhance early education — expert
THE DEPARTMENT of Education (DepEd) must enhance the public Kindergarten education program and increase mother tongue instruction programs to improve the global performance of Filipino students, an education expert told the Senate on Wednesday.
At a Senate hearing looking into the Philippines’ poor performance in the 2022 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) Senior Research Fellow Michael Ralph M. Abrigo said Filipino students would have better reading and writing skills by the time they enter primary school through a more proficient Kindergarten program.
Citing DepEd data, Mr. Abrigo added that students taught in their mother tongue were less likely to experience learning loss and would score higher in Science and Mathematics subjects.
Filipino students ranked 77th out of 81 countries in the 2022 PISA, performing worse than the global average in all categories.
Senator Maria Lourdes Nancy S. Binay said the government should revisit the methodology of teaching students, which she said was too focused on memorization instead of applying the lessons learned.
In 2022, the Philippines placed 22nd out of 111 countries in the 2022 English Proficiency Index by Education First. The country got a score of 578, which is considered high, second in the Asia-Pacific region after Singapore.
Students in the Philippines and Indonesia are more than a year behind in their learning because of the pandemic, McKinsey & Co. said in a report published in April last year.
A quarter-million Filipino students moved from private to public schools in 2020 and 2021, as many parents lost their jobs, according to the Education department.
In a July 2023 report, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said the Philippines should use education technology to bridge the skills gap or risk job losses due to rapid technological advancements. — John Victor D. Ordoñez