This year, for the first time in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Center for the Assessment of the Quality of Education (UCEA) is conducting a nationwide monitoring study "The State of Formation of Reading and Mathematical Competences of Primary School Graduates". As part of the study, fourth-graders perform test tasks in mathematics and reading, as well as fill out questionnaires.
The technology of organization of questionnaires of the current cycle of research meets international and national standards. Yes, the questionnaire materials are completely anonymous: the organizers do not even collect lists of students participating in the study and only the number of students in a separate class is known (this enables the preparation of a sufficient number of test materials). Before starting the questionnaire, the children receive instructions, in which it is noted that the questionnaires are processed by a computer and that neither classmates, nor teachers, nor other persons will know about their answers. It is also important to emphasize that the heads of educational institutions received information about the study in advance and had to warn parents about its conduct. After a warning, parents could refuse to participate in the study (order of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Science dated 09.02.2018 No. 118).
The structure of the student monitoring questionnaire is a set of blocks of questions traditional for similar studies, namely questions about social and material factors that affect the success of studies, the level of comfort during the child's stay at school, preschool preparation and the student's attendance at extracurricular activities. In addition to the above, the questionnaire also includes blocks of questions developed specifically for the study, including the peculiarities of students' performance of homework, reading and mathematical practices used by students in their studies.
To develop the questionnaires, experts used international experience, as well as the characteristic features of teaching literary reading and mathematics in Ukraine. In particular, the approaches of authoritative international comparative studies of the quality of education were used: PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, conducted among fourth-graders) and TIMSS (The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study scientific education, conducted among students of the fourth and eighth grades). We offer you to familiarize yourself with examples of questionnaires for fourth-graders of the mentioned studies.
Finally, it is worth paying attention to the fact that questionnaires are an important element of monitoring research on the quality of primary education, because the combination of data on the participants' performance of test tasks and their answers to questionnaire questions will allow not only to obtain thorough and comprehensive information about the level of development of students' reading and mathematical competences at the threshold of the new Ukrainian school, but also to early eliminate some negative factors that affect the educational progress of students.
