Session Information
23 SES 05 C, Structural Conditions of Education
Paper Session
Contribution
Croatian compulsory basic education is achieving bellow average results in all three types of literacy measured by PISA 2006 and 2009 assessment. Nevertheless, the educational authorities propagate that the structure of the pre-tertiary education is sound and that its performance will improve through the implementation of the new National curriculum. According to the authorities, substantial dropout rate at the upper-secondary level (around 20% of students) will be minimized through the prolongation of the compulsory education to the first two grades of the upper secondary education. The aim of these structural reforms is to improve the quality of both elementary and secondary levels of education.
Croatia has eight year compulsory basic education which, for the most of pupils, ends at the age of 14. Both primary and lower secondary education lasts 4 years each. At the end of the lower secondary education there is a horizontal differentiation in four types of programs. With respect to the duration, Croatia is a part of few countries with eight year compulsory general education. The aim of the educational policy is to enlarge shorter compulsory general education by proclaiming first two years of the upper secondary education compulsory and by increasing the elements of the general education in these two years. The educational authorities hold opinion that this is better than to prolong compulsory general education from eight to nine years.
We hold the proposed solution of educational stakeholders as suboptimal and that it would be better to prolong compulsory general education for one year. Numerous findings from educational sciences, mainly stemming from psychology and sociology of education, as well as PISA results are strongly in favor of this hypothesis.
Main arguments for this are:
It is better to conduct horizontal differentiation of pupils later when their cognitive capabilities are stabilized and their professional interest are finely profiled (better after the 15th than 14th years of age). Earlier transfer of pupils with lower achievement into the programs with lower demand has a negative effect on the aspirations of pupils, parents and teachers for higher educational achievement in general core subjects. The lesser aspirations additionally lower pupils’ motivation for learning these subjects. In addition to this, teachers’ motivation for teaching general core subjects in vocational schools, where vocational subjects are considered as more important, will be lower. All of this will result in the fact that the quality of general education in vocational schools will be lower than in gymnasiums.
Earlier differentiation is characterized by increased correlation between socioeconomic familial background and pupils’ educational achievement which contributes to the effects of stigmatization and lowering of the development of the human potential. Since the quality of the familial support, which depends on human, social and cultural capital of family, is of higher importance in the earlier age (when the neural structures are plastic) thus the effect of the status of the family (expressed by PISA ESCS index) on the choice of the program in the upper secondary education is larger in the case of earlier differentiation.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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