Promising signs for the new school year

In the 2024-2025 school year, we will officially complete the 2018 General Education Program for all grades. Official dispatch 3935 of the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has just issued a request not to use textbooks as periodic tests for Literature, a promising signal for many innovations before the school year.

Going back in time, it is not by chance that in the past, when testing and evaluating students in Literature in schools, we often used materials in textbooks.

With this method, we can evaluate the amount of basic, core knowledge that each student needs to master during the learning process.

Inevitable change

This method also helps maintain fairness for all students. In fact, each candidate's ability to access learning materials depends on many different objective factors such as living region, economic conditions, teacher and school resources, etc., not just on the subjective factor of the student's learning ability.

And in particular, using Literature exam questions with materials in textbooks also partly reduces stress for students and teachers - which is always a concern for a country that still has a strong Confucian influence and values ​​degrees like ours.

However, over time, the way of making questions using materials in Literature textbooks also revealed inevitable limitations.

In order for the Literature exam to be most effective without using textbook materials, it is necessary to absolutely say no to the disease of achievement during the implementation process. (Source: VGP)

Although this method helps assess the basic level of students, it does not fully reflect this ability, especially in cases where students are able to understand and apply knowledge at a higher level. This leads to limiting the ability of critical thinking and creativity of learners.

Students only memorize and parrot sentence types, question types, and analysis types, only "reproducing" the teacher's feelings and thoughts without having the opportunity to "speak another voice", their own voice about literary works and literary characters.

These limitations of the way questions are set, over time, lead to the situation where teaching and learning literature follows a rut, mostly falling into the pressure of studying for exams, guessing and learning by heart. The ability to perceive literature of each individual learner cannot be developed. Both teachers and students fall into the trap of rote teaching and rote learning.

Therefore, implementing the method of creating questions without using materials in textbooks is an inevitable direction. The development of society, students have more conditions to access diverse and equal sources of materials in all localities, which is also a favorable basis for us to change.

We have also had a roadmap for this change, right from the start of replacing textbooks for the 2018 General Education Program for each school year.

And in the 2024-2025 school year, with the application of new textbooks for grades 5, 9, and 12, we officially complete the 2018 program for all grades.

To make the new question method effective

Testing and evaluation is one of the important operations of teaching and learning activities, requiring a lot of effort and need to be carefully calculated and considered.

We need to comprehensively and accurately test students' learning abilities, while encouraging their creativity and critical thinking.

In order to prevent the issue of creating Literature exam questions that do not use textbook materials from becoming a pressure for both teachers and learners, we need to consider some notes.

As the exam questions change, teaching methods need to change accordingly. Teachers need to encourage students to read and analyze texts outside the curriculum through activities such as building book clubs, reading sessions, news discussions, etc.

Not only reading, we also need to create conditions for students to discuss, present, and share their personal views on texts outside of textbooks. Writing reading diaries, seminars, research projects, etc. are ways we can implement to guide learners to improve their skills of perception, analysis, and presentation.

With the above teaching method, the teacher gives the power to open the text to the learner; only gives the learner the "key", but does not "open the door" for the learner; only gives the method, but does not give the answer.

Each method of setting questions has certain positive and negative aspects. Perhaps we can combine both harmoniously.

That is, the test can include questions based on textbook and non-textbook materials. This ensures fairness and safety for students' learning ability and performance; at the same time, it helps the test differentiate.

The exam should also target skills of analysis, synthesis and application of knowledge through open-ended questions. For example, asking to make connections with previously studied topics, or to apply literary theories to new texts.

Professional management levels need to have specific guidance documents, clearly defining the criteria for selecting non-textbook materials to include in the test.

It is also necessary to pay attention to training and capacity building for teachers through short-term and medium-term training courses on new techniques and methods in creating creative exam questions.

In reality, due to the pressure of fear of making mistakes and fear of responsibility, network experts often only state general requirements on choosing materials, leading to teachers who create test questions being confused and encountering many difficulties, often choosing safe directions for creating questions, not boldly creating.

Besides the fact that after each test and assessment, the exam questions need to be discussed to point out the limitations (if any), we also need to organize forums so that teachers can share their experiences in setting questions.

This is an extremely important source of ideas that should be fully utilized. These forums are also an opportunity to record feedback and contributions from the teacher's perspective, helping to improve the task of setting questions, in accordance witheducational goals.

In order for the Literature exam to be most effective without using textbook materials, it is necessary to absolutely say no to the disease of achievement during the implementation process. Only when and only when the issue of scores is not emphasized, will both teachers and students have pure motivation to do well in teaching and learning literature, avoiding the situation of thinking of new ways to cope with the new form of exam.

Source: https://baoquocte.vn/ngu-lieu-ra-de-ngoai-sach-giao-khoa-tin-hieu-hua-hen-cho-nam-hoc-moi-282653.html