The Primary Exit Profile (PEP) performance of students in western Jamaica was on par with other parishes, despite the impact of Hurricane Melissa, says Education, Skills, Youth and Information Minister, Senator Dr. the Hon. Dana Morris Dixon.
“In the areas affected by the hurricane, we did a separate set of studies to see how they compared to previous years and there was no change to their performance,” she said.
“That’s a cause for celebration because in spite of what we went through our children did very well,” she added.
Dr. Morris Dixon was addressing Monday’s (June 22) PEP Press Conference at Jamaica House.
She noted that 440 schools in three regions across seven parishes were significantly affected by the hurricane, with 12, 800 students impacted.
“This was one third of those who took the exams,” the Minister pointed out.
Deputy Chief Education Officer, Exam and Assessment Administration Services, Maryah Ho-Young, in providing further details, said that the Ministry looked at each of the parishes in those impacted regions as separate groups.
“We compared their performance to the national means and we compared it to how the trend performance for those parishes would have been in the past. There was no fall-off when we did that comparison,” she pointed out.
Mrs. Ho-Young said the Ministry also conducted a deeper analysis, examining students’ performance on a question-by-question basis.
“For each item on the test, we compared how they performed on each of those to the other students in the other parishes and they did not perform differently from how those children performed,” she said.
