National external assessment of the Slovene language in the third grade of elementary school

Assessment of the knowledge is performed in all school subjects and is an important factor in all educational institutions because it is the means of ascertaining of learning objectives and standards of the knowledge. In addition to an internal assessment of the knowledge which is prepared by the teacher, an external assessment of the knowledge, the so-called national assessment of the knowledge, is also prepared in the Slovenian elementary school. It is prepared by experts for a specific subject field and is the same for all the students. It is performed at the end of the 6th and the 9th grade of the elementary school. Its main purpose is to get feedback on the knowledge of students from several subjects. The national assessment of the knowledge from Slovenian language (the same as the national assessment of the knowledge from other subjects) is based on the existing curriculum and is composed in accordance with the learning objectives and standards of the knowledge which are written in it. In the school year 2017/18, an experimental external national assessment of the knowledge (NPZ) from the Slovenian language was also performed in the third grades of the elementary school. In the master’s thesis, we ascertained by means of the quantitative analysis which we performed in Slovenian elementary schools what Slovenian three-graders think about the experimental national assessment of the knowledge which was taken by them that year and what the teachers who taught in the 3rd grade in that school year think. We ascertained that there were differences among the teachers regarding the opinion about the national assessment of the knowledge in the 3rd grade. There were statistically significant differences in the opinion of the teachers whether the NPZ from the Slovenian language is a good indicator of the knowledge of the students – teachers with less than 10 years of service have a better opinion about that and see more advantages because of the external assessment of the knowledge at the end of the first triad as the other teachers do. The teachers expected such accomplishments of their students as they were achieved at the NPZ. Regarding the difficulty of the NPZ, the students and the teachers believe that the test was appropriately demanding. The teachers found those task of the test as the most demanding which tested the knowledge of the read text, the task for the explanation of the meaning of the words, and writing a short non-artistic text. According to the teachers’ opinion, the students tried hard during the test and were not afraid of the test. There was a difference regarding the preparations of the students on the test. There were statistically significant differences between the teachers who taught in the 3rd grade only one school year and the teachers who taught in the 3rd grade several years. The teachers who taught in the 3rd grade for the first time had been preparing the students on the NPZ during the Slovenian language lessons. The others had not. The teachers wrote that they would not take into account the results from the NPZ at the end grade of the Slovenian language. According to the opinion of the teachers who served less than 10 years, however, the NPZ would influence the planning of their school lessons in the future. Among the students, there were no statistically significant differences in the opinion about the NPZ with regards to the gender. However, there were statistically significant differences with regards to the final grade they received at the Slovenian language. We can confirm that the final grade influences statistically significantly the opinion the students have of regarding the difficulty of the NPZ from the Slovenian language in the 3rd grade