2024-09-30 00:25:33
- Students will correct mistakes in words like luni lachi
- No special technical provision will be required
or a reader in an emergency
Dictation at the end of 4th grade will now be replaced by a text error editing task.
Editing text will replace the dictation of the exam at the end of 4th grade. This became clear after the final publication of the National External Evaluation (NEO) model for the academic year 2024/2025 on the website of the Ministry of Education and Science.
Dropping dictation is the main change in the test for this year, most of the other tasks are kept as a model. The test contains 13 linguistic, 11 literary and 1 speech tasks of a creative nature. With the language tasks, mastery of the literary norms, which are basic for language culture, is checked, and with the literary tasks, the skills of reading with understanding are checked.
The published exam pattern provides sample text for editing:
The first waning moons shone in the dark autumn nosh. The sky wept. The little raindrops lit up. They watered the thirsty soil. The darkness subsided.
The old ass stood tall and handsome. The shadows of its branches drew strange shapes on the wet road and the roofs of the houses. Icy winds ran through the sleeping streets.
The idea is that in the last task of the exam, fourth graders find and edit words with misspellings. This is a task traditionally used in primary education. In this way, the types of tasks for checking basic literacy in the field of spelling will be diversified, but without requiring special technical provision or a reader in an emergency situation, the ministry explained.
“The changes are a continuation of our efforts to put more emphasis on exams on
the measurement of acquired competences, not just the reproduction of knowledge”,
Minister Prof. Galin Tsokov explained some time ago. The goal of the Ministry of Education and Culture is to increase the number of tasks that test practical skills necessary for life, as well as those that require making cross-curricular connections.
The language tasks will also check prefix recognition, formation of new words with the learned morphemes,
recognition of parts of speech
(nouns, adjectives, verbs, personal pronouns or numerals) and determining their grammatical features. Fourth graders should be able to distinguish between the literal and figurative meaning of a word.
In literary tasks, students will have to discover the meaning of unfamiliar words in the context of the work, extract specific information from a text, prove the meaning of what they have read, and compose a text based on verbal or visual support. They must be able to comment on facts and ideas from a foreign text.
The speaking task checks whether the use of language means is appropriate according to the communicative situation, understanding the assigned topic of the composition text and sticking to it when writing, as well as expressing one’s own opinion and reasoning in view of the communication situation.
The maximum number of points in the exam is 100 points, the MES reminded.
Knowledge of numbers and the principle of formation of the series of natural numbers,
addition, subtraction, multiplication and division skills,
to find the unknown are among the competencies that will be tested by the external assessment in mathematics for 4th grade this year. Children must also show skills for logical and spatial thinking and for reading information presented in a different form – table, graph, infogram.
The ministry explained that there will be 16 multiple-choice tasks, 4 with a short free answer, and 4 with an extended free answer. One will be the extended free response task containing three sub-conditions. The maximum number of points in the mathematics test is 100.