Kyrgyz Republic

The quality of education in the Kyrgyz Republic was dramatically impacted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. To reverse the decline in education quality, the government and development partners began working together to modernize the Kyrgyz education system. A number of reforms were implemented by the Ministry of Education and Science in an effort to strengthen the system and improve quality.

Given all of these targeted efforts to improve education quality, the country was shocked when it received the results from the 2006 and 2009 PISA exercises and discovered that, in each instance, the Kyrgyz Republic ranked last out of all participating countries. The government realized that, in addition to collecting system-level data on learning outcomes, there was a serious need to actively monitor and support the education process in classrooms. With the support of the READ Trust Fund, the Kyrgyz Republic has been placing an even greater emphasis on regular, high-quality, formative assessment in the classroom. A new national assessment strategy highlights the importance of formative, summative, and system-level assessments all working together to reach the government’s goal of quality learning for all Kyrgyz children.

The main objective of the READ Trust Fund program in the Kyrgyz Republic in the first stage of the Program was to strengthen the capacity of institutions responsible for measuring student learning outcomes, and improve the use of information from those assessments to improve teaching and learning.

The READ Trust Fund program in the Kyrgyz Republic played a catalytic role in promoting the importance of assessment and monitoring student learning outcomes. The new strategy document provides a clearer vision and roadmap for developing a national assessment system and KAE, the NTC, CEATM, and teacher training institutions all have more clearly defined mandates. Due to the training provided in classroom assessment, more than 6,200 primary school teachers are better equipped to incorporate formative assessment into their teaching practices. The new guidelines for teachers, other materials, and training courses for both in-service and pre-service teachers better ensure that teachers will develop the requisite skills and provide more regular and systematic monitoring of learning in the classroom.

During the second stage of the READ Trust Fund program in 2016-2019 Kyrgyz Republic implements project “Strengthening Student Assessment for Improved Learning”.

Trained four Kyrgyz psychometricians at Cito on the technical aspects of secondary analysis of the 2017 National Sample Based Assessment (NSBA) results, including on Item Response Theory (IRT) modeling and on designing sample based national assessments

 

Discussed the draft secondary analysis of the NSBA 2017 with a group of key experts

 

Conducted the third round of trainings for 40 test developers and National Testing Center (NTC) staff on the basics of item writing for multiple-choice questions for all grade 11 subjects, with a focus on the evaluation of test items developed and quality assurance steps

Supported development of the Concept Paper on the National Assessment for general education, and presented a new scoring scale of learning achievements

 

Provided practical support to 14 pilot schools’ 14 mentors and 28 teachers on tracking the Emotional Support domain of classroom practice (including cycle tracking forms and video segments of the classroom practice)

 

Conducted trainings on the Classroom Organization domain of classroom practice for selected teachers, mentor and Deputy Directors of 14 schools

 

Monitored the training and coaching processes of the teacher professional development models (CLASS and Coaching) with international technical assistance from the University of Virginia