Every year schools across the Island administer the Terra Nova test. For readers who are not familiar with Terra Nova, it's a standardised achievement test designed to provide a measure of how well the public school system is performing and allows comparisons to be made between local and student peer groups in North America.

Terra Nova testing is an annual event, administered towards the end of each school year and the test quizzes students on mathematics, reading/language arts, science and social studies at levels P3 through S2.

"There are of course some exceptions. Students who have serious cognitive or physical disabilities that prevent them from taking the test will be exempted. But all students are expected to take the test... whether they are students who are (high)-flyers or students who are struggling, they are still expected to take the test," consultant to the Ministry of Education, Dr. Henry Johnson explains.

As for its value to Bermuda, Dr. Johnson says the results give an indication of how Bermuda's students fare on this particular test against a "particular norm population" in the United States — where the test was designed.

In other words, the Ministry of Education uses the results to get some sense of how Bermuda students are doing.

However in recent years these results have not painted a glowing picture: "I have looked at the data and I think student performance is unacceptably low across the board in our schools. But there are some schools that are doing better than others and some have student performance which is up in the 60 percentile. But too many schools have performance well below the 50 percentile and that's not good."

He says this is reflected in reading/language arts and mathematics and mostly on Middle School level. "However, in any school where the performance of students as a group is less than 50 percentile, there's cause for concern!"

So why can't the test be used for accountability purposes? Dr. Johnson points out that the Tera Nova results cannot be used for accountability purposes because it is not designed to measure against the Bermuda curriculum.

"Even the developers of the test caution against using the results for high stakes accountability purposes," he stresses. That's where the new Bermuda Criterion Reference Test comes in.

Dr. Johnson explains that this test, which was specifically designed to measure against the curriculum of Bermuda, was administered for the first time in June this year to literally test its effectiveness.

Therefore the results of the Bermuda Criterion Reference Test can be used to gauge how effective students are learning the curriculum, but also gauges the effectiveness of teachers and leadership at schools.

Another difference — unlike the Tera Nova, the Bermuda Criterion Reference Test looks at students' writing abilities. Both the Bermuda Criterion Reference Test and the Tera Nova test will be implemented in schools across the Island in this coming year.