Within the EU funded “Education for Employment, BiH” Project, the Working Group (WG) for the preparation and implementation of external exams held its fourth meeting in Mostar on November 30 and December 1, 2021. The WG reviewed and made the final changes to the Operational Plan for conducting external examinations, which they intend to submit for approval at the next Project Steering Committee meeting in January 2022.
The fourth Working Group meeting came after a series of consultative meetings with the competent ministries of education in BiH, which resulted in a favourable opinion on the objectives and methodology for carrying out the planned external exams.
The exams will be given to a sample of 1,370 students from 50 schools across Bosnia and Herzegovina in the areas of language and mathematical literacy, and they will follow the logic of the PISA survey. The WG’s external testing conceptualization and methodology are supposed to serve as a long-term model for organizing such testing in the future.
Periodic external assessment of student achievements is a standard practice for monitoring educational outcomes in well-developed education systems in the EU and worldwide. Such assessments enable policymakers to evaluate the state of education and design development strategies based on valid, reliable, and objective data.
In order to overcome the high unemployment rate and a huge mismatch of the education and training systems with the demands of the labour market, the EU funded project “Education for Employment, BiH” aims to produce human resources in line with the labour market needs in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The project will assist BiH authorities in improving capacity and structure for planning the educational process and quality of educational outcomes.
