AMMAN — The educational process in Jordan, both on the
school and university levels, has suffered “a real disruption” due to remote
learning policies imposed since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a policy
brief issued by the
Jordan Strategy Forum (JSF) on Tuesday highlighted.
اضافة اعلان
The policy brief, titled "Education and Adaptation to
the Effects of COVID-19 in Jordan: How to Reduce the Repercussions of the
Pandemic on the Education Gap," addresses the importance of education for
growth and prosperity, and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on widening
the educational gap among students in Jordan.
The database of the United Nations Children's Fund (
UNICEF)
indicates that Jordan has ranked 20th in the world in terms of the length of
school closures due to the outbreak of the pandemic, as the total days of closure
reached 148 days during the period from March 2020 to February 2021.
“With the start of the new school year (2021/2022), school
students in Jordan will have lost more than most countries in the world in
terms of in-person education,” the paper said.
In this context, the JSF stressed the need to view the
quality of education in the academic year 2020/2021 as “a sensitive issue and
an urgent priority.”
The JSF based its analysis of the reality of post-COVID
education on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which
measures the competence of participating students from 78 countries around the
world in applying cognitive skills in the fields of science, reading and
mathematics.
According to World Bank data for 2020 quoted in the brief,
the “Adjusted Years of Schooling” indicator, which assesses the number of years
of schooling a student is expected to receive versus the quality of education a
student receives, based on the results of the Program for International Student
Assessment, found that Jordanian students attend 12 school years, but that
their effective learning is equivalent to only 8.1 years, while the average
years in Singapore for example is 12.9 years.
According to a study issued by the World Bank in which it
simulated the potential impact of the pandemic on education in Jordan, the
pandemic will lead to a decline in the Adjusted Years of Schooling index in
Jordan by 0.4-0.9 years, the paper said.
The impact of the pandemic will also negatively affect the
grades of students within the PISA program, which means a decline in the
improvement achieved by Jordan in the last two rounds of results.
The think tank pointed out that the performance of Jordanian
students in the PISA was satisfactory in the fields of reading, mathematics and
science compared to other Arab countries that took part in the assessment, and
that the performance of Jordanian students has improved in all fields of
knowledge within the last two rounds of the program, noting that the
performance of participating students from private schools in Jordan was found
to be better than that of their counterparts in public schools.
In this context, the JSF indicated that it is “unfortunate
that the repercussions of the pandemic were allowed to increase this gap
between private and public school students.”
Moreover, learning losses could translate into lower incomes
for Jordanian students in the future, with the average annual income expected
to drop by up to 8 percent, according to the JSF.
The Jordan Strategy Forum recommended that learning losses
be compensated for students who attend both public and private schools,
pointing to the availability of a myriad of options for decision makers, which
include assessing learning losses, monitoring progress when students return to
school, adjusting the school calendar, introducing assessment programs,
modifying the scope of educational curricula to be covered, providing
accelerated learning programs, hiring new teachers, increasing study time, and
other measures that will reduce the negative repercussions of the pandemic.
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