Geisha Kow­lessar

Gov­ern­ment is con­sid­er­ing spend­ing $24 mil­lion on the pur­chase of study guides for stu­dents prepar­ing for the Caribbean Ad­vanced Pro­fi­cien­cy Ex­am­i­na­tions (CAPE) and the Caribbean Sec­ondary Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate (CSEC). The Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tions Coun­cil (CXC) and the UK-based pub­lish­ing house Nel­son Thornes yes­ter­day launched 15 study guides at a func­tion held at the Crowne Plaza Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain.

De­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh said the min­istry sup­plied books at no cost to sec­ondary schools but more dis­cus­sions were need­ed be­fore fur­ther pur­chas­es are made. Gopeesingh, how­ev­er, sees the idea as worth con­sid­er­ing.

"These study guides are wel­comed to the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem with­in the Caribbean. It helps with the teach­ers, di­rect­ing them with the cur­ricu­lum. "It is some­thing worth the con­sid­er­a­tion in terms of costs for the tax­pay­ers of Trinidad and To­ba­go, but ob­vi­ous­ly it would ben­e­fit all the stu­dents," Gopeesingh added.

Su­san Giles, CXC's se­nior as­sis­tant reg­is­trar, ex­am­i­na­tions ad­min­is­tra­tion and se­cu­ri­ty di­vi­sion, said the cost of ed­u­ca­tion to re­gion­al gov­ern­ments was ris­ing ex­po­nen­tial­ly and drew a cor­re­la­tion be­tween can­di­date per­for­mance and the cost be­ing ex­pend­ed.

"A re­view of the 2011 re­gion­al per­for­mance shows that 30 per cent of those pre­sent­ed for the CSEC May/June ex­am­i­na­tions ob­tained no sub­jects at ac­cept­able grades at that sit­ting. This has to be of con­cern to all of us," Giles said. She said dis­cus­sions in teacher train­ing work­shops across the re­gion had re­vealed a strug­gle with the par­a­digm shift from teacher-cen­tred to learn­er-cen­tred ed­u­ca­tion.

"As we lis­tened to the feed­back from teach­ers, it be­came clear we need to pro­vide some core re­source ma­te­r­i­al that would pro­vide the in­struc­tion­al sup­port that em­bod­ies the fo­cus of the CSEC and CAPE," said Giles.

The guides

The eight study guides launched for the CSEC are:

Eng­lish A

Eng­lish B

In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy

In­te­grat­ed Sci­ence

Math­e­mat­ics

Of­fice Ad­min­is­tra­tion

Prin­ci­ples of Busi­ness and So­cial Stud­ies

Sev­en CAPE study guides are:

Ac­count­ing Unit 1

Ac­count­ing Unit 2

Bi­ol­o­gy Unit 1

Caribbean Stud­ies

Chem­istry Unit 1

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Stud­ies

Eco­nom­ics Unit 1