Lower pass marks – fuelling the fire?
Education is challenged in all aspects, all over the world.
Education is challenged in all aspects throughout the world, and South Africa is no stranger to the problem.
In South Africa, very few students can read at their grade’s level, few of them pass Grade 12 on time and only the barest minimum of them are equipped with the necessary skills to succeed in the life and workplaces of the 21st century and beyond.
Lectorsa (a South African company that supplies solutions internationally to the primary, secondary and tertiary education sectors, and to the corporate sector), asked if lowering the requirements to pass in school, as recently considered by the Department of Basic Education, is truly the answer, or is it only fuelling the fire.
Co-director of Lectorsa, Minda Marshall, said: “Today we live in a technology- and media-suffused environment with access to an abundance of information, and our expectations, both for students and in the workplace, have increased dramatically, but our methods of interacting with information have not. Students are already challenged and need improved development of skills and strategies in order to not only survive but excel in the environments they will have to function in. Lowering the standard is not the answer we are looking for.
“Due to the explosion of data, a gap (the information/ application gap) has formed between the student and the curriculum, placing learners, students and our workforce under a lot of strain and resulting in poor academics and a decrease in work-readiness.
“We need to bridge this gap by re-wiring learners’ minds, by developing their cognitive and visual processing skills and by equipping them with the right ‘tools’ to succeed in this globally and digitally interconnected world,” she said.
“Life-long learning is the only way to sustain proficient learning in the world we live in today. Never before has it been more important to activate students’ minds, train and develop accurate ways to facilitate the process of reading and improve comprehension through cognitive development. I stand by my view that the answer does not lie in lowering the pass rate, but in re-imagining our methods of teaching,” she concluded.
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