Results of the second stage of the international scientific project

On February 11, 2021, the participants of the international scientific project (Abai KazNPU and the Higher School of Economics, Moscow) dedicated to measuring the reading skills of primary school students, invited school teachers to the webinar, who for two years participated in the first and second stages of this research. The meeting was attended by over 40 teachers from 11 schools in Almaty.

Elena Kardanova, Director of the Center for Monitoring the Quality of Education, Associate Professor of the Department of Educational Programs of the Institute of Education of the Higher School of Economics, spoke at the webinar. She spoke about the importance of the measuring instruments «Start» and «Progress» and thanked the project participants from the Kazakh side, who, under the leadership of Professor Saule Abisheva, had done a great job: in 2019 more than 1000 first-graders were examined, in 2020 (in terms of distance learning) - about 900-second graders.

The webinar was continued by Inna Antipkina, a researcher at the Center for Psychometrics and Measurements in Education, who, with the help of summarizing graphs and diagrams, demonstrated the results of a study to Kazakhstani teachers, showing significant progress in mastering reading skills by Almaty primary school students.

The teachers who spoke at the webinar thanked the participants of the international project for the opportunity to get an objective assessment tool and expressed their desire to continue cooperation. Teachers will be interested to see how current second graders progress in reading towards the end of elementary school. All teachers who participated in the project were awarded personal certificates, and directors and head teachers of schools were awarded letters of thanks.

Concluding the meeting, Head of the Department of Russian Language and Literature of the Institute of Philology and Multilingual Education, Saule Abisheva expressed hope that the continuation of work on the project, including the creation of a measuring tool for schools with Kazakh language of instruction, would be a very important contribution to the development of the education system in Kazakhstan.