Panama encourages educational programs to enhance learning

According to that department’s Deputy Director of General Basic Education, Antonio Pedroza, one of those projects is Let’s Learn to Read Everyone, which aims to improve students’ reading and writing comprehension, one of the weakest wings.

He said that this program makes it possible to identify the level of missing learning among students, especially from grades one to four, and identifies educational intervention strategies that will be implemented.

The other is the Latin American and Caribbean Education Research and Innovation Laboratory’s “Inclusive, Emotional and Social Learning Recovery Program,” which provides educators with pedagogical resources, he said.

A recent study, “Inequality in Literacy Development and Access to Online Education in Public and Private Schools in Panama,” suggests that the pandemic has had a significant decline in reading performance.

In my pre-pandemic (2019) and post-pandemic (2021) analysis, it was found that in general education there is a significant loss in letter recognition speed and word reading speed of fourth graders, which was not observed. See private schools.

Regarding the study, researcher Nadia De Leon commented that it shows the gaps in communication and high-quality digital tools, during two years without face-to-face education.

The difference in academic achievement between students from the official system and the private system is one of the indicators of the inequality crisis we are facing, especially since there are great differences between urban and rural areas and between indigenous areas and the rest of the country, narrowed

“The socioeconomic level of families is more strongly correlated with learning outcomes in Panama than in other countries in the region, which indicates that our system is not delivering on the promise of education, which is to be an equality of opportunity,” he noted.

With a focus on learning recovery, the 2023 academic year in the Isthmus began on March 6 with the integration of 954,231 students into classrooms in the public and private sectors.

Preliminary statistics indicate that there are 830 thousand and 181 students in state centers, and in particular 124 thousand and 50 students, as a result of the migration of more than 14 thousand students from private schools to the public system.

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