Abstract
Following the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in 1975, “Year Zero” became the beginning of the destruction of the previous regime, many of its officials and teachers, and its education system. With the expulsion of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MoEYS) faced a massive task of rebuilding an education system with strictly limited numbers of teachers, materials, and classrooms. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, considerable progress had been made in the task of rehabilitating the essentials of the primary school system, with majority enrolments of both girls and boys, emerging improvements in retention, and the beginnings of a modern curriculum. The basis had been established for planning more sophisticated standards of learning to enable the Cambodian economy to prosper.
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Notes
- 1.
The Education Quality Improvement Project (EQIP) ran from 1999 to 2004 and included an ambitious testing programme in the three provinces where it operated. However, the standardized tests were not as comprehensive as the later assessment tests and were only applied in this one region of the country (in one grade).
- 2.
In general, groups of 8–14 common test questions (called “anchor” or “link” questions) are included on otherwise different tests that are applied in different years. Item Response Theory (IRT) tools are used to obtain statistical scores that can be compared between years. This process does depend on the quality of the common questions, which are evaluated one-by-one to insure they meet the standard of acceptable link/anchor items. All of this work is completed by EQAD using the Item and Test Analysis (IATA) software. The number of acceptable common questions varies by test subject and grade, although in some cases a relatively small number of common items are used, which can impact the validity of the comparisons over time (see Marshall et al., 2012, for a more detailed discussion of this process).
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Marshall, J.H., Ung, C. (2022). Cambodia National Assessment: A Summary of 10 Years of Student Achievement Results. In: McNamara, V., Hayden, M. (eds) Education in Cambodia. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 64. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8213-1_8
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