Former Chief Education Officer Joseph Christopher has questioned the validity of introducing a more international benchmark in the place of Terra Nova in the public school system.

The Terra Nova tests are administered throughout the US, and are based on a student sample representative of that country's population.

In Bermuda, students in grades P3-S2 take the tests in reading, language and mathematics, with scores produced for each subject as well as a total overall score.

This year's results revealed students have made progress in language and reading but are failing in mathematics, while overall public school results lag behind the US median average of 50 percent.

Shadow Education Minister Grant Gibbons has called for the Terra Nova tests to be replaced by a more international system such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) or TIMMS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study).

But in a letter to this newspaper, Dr. Christopher said the relevance of PISA or TIMMS to Bermuda was still "questionable".

"The PISA and TIMMS programmes each test a sample of students from the population of a country so that they can report on the comparative performance of that country against various other countries.

"In order to ensure a reasonable level of accuracy in the report, the sample includes students from private schools as well as government schools and also includes students from all income levels."

He said a recent article by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on April 12, 2007, said 400,000 students were tested in 57 countries for the 2006 PISA report.

"This is an average of 7,000 students per country but I assume that a large country like the United States with more than 49,000,000 students will test more students than a small country like New Zealand which has about 700,000 students," he said.

"Bermuda's public school system has fewer than 7,000 students and would not fit the requirement for inclusion of both public and private schools or the full range of income levels. For these reasons the validity of a comparison would be questionable."

Dr. Christopher said: "Finally, we should take into account a tendency towards testing overload within the local public education system.

"Near the end of the school year some students take all of the following: Terra Nova tests, BSC tests, GCSE tests, the new McGraw/Hill locally standardised tests, school-based tests for graduation or promotion, and practice tests for all of the above. Adding PISA?".

Dr. Gibbons last week called for PISA to be introduced in public schools as a higher international benchmark to aim for.

"Terra Nova is a US-based test and I don't think the US is the best education system to compare ourselves to," he said.

"PISA would be a better benchmark because our students are competing against people who come from all over the world into our economy, and the US public school system doesn't rank highly compared to other countries like the UK, Canada, Singapore and Finland."

n See letter on Page 4.