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Educational System and Curriculum in Brunei

The educational system in Brunei has undergone reforms to assessments in order to accommodate students with disabilities and implement a new curriculum. Examinations have been adjusted to assess students based on criteria instead of comparing them to each other. This requires the Ministry of Education to define new benchmarks for student success. Additionally, schools are providing seminars and workshops to help teachers understand changes to assessments from the new curriculum and different types of assessments that will be used. Overall, reforms aim to improve assessments and better support students of varying abilities and backgrounds.

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Alondra Manuay
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112 views2 pages

Educational System and Curriculum in Brunei

The educational system in Brunei has undergone reforms to assessments in order to accommodate students with disabilities and implement a new curriculum. Examinations have been adjusted to assess students based on criteria instead of comparing them to each other. This requires the Ministry of Education to define new benchmarks for student success. Additionally, schools are providing seminars and workshops to help teachers understand changes to assessments from the new curriculum and different types of assessments that will be used. Overall, reforms aim to improve assessments and better support students of varying abilities and backgrounds.

Uploaded by

Alondra Manuay
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Educational System and Curriculum in Brunei

Most of the skills and knowledge taught formally in schools end up by being
assessed in tests. This relationship between examinations and teaching applies to
many education systems and implies that mere reform the curriculum alone may not be
succeed without also innovating the assessments. Following the implementation of the
policy of inclusive education (Ministry of Education, 1997; 1998). Examinations were
adjusted to accommodate the needs of students with disabilities. Brunei students with
mild, moderate and severe special needs now attend regular schools and write the
same examination papers as their non-disabled peers.

Some accommodations that need to be made for such students are discussed in
detail by (Murray 1996). With the implementation of the current ongoing curriculum
reforms and the program for the education of the gifted and talented students in 2009 ,
Brunei is poised to make more adaptations to school assessments. For example the
Ministry of Education (2007) has promised to reform the emphasis of the national
examinations from norm-referencing to criterion-referencing. This has wide ranging
implications. The department of Examinations in the Ministry of Education will need to
define and develop new criteria or benchmarks for success at various class levels in the
system of education.

In various SPN21 curriculum documents (Ministry of Education, 2007), the


government of Brunei has rightly called for the reform of the school assessments both
informal continuous assessments (Student Progress Assessment, School Based
Assessments which is formative evaluation but not so with the Student Progress
Assessment and the Student Progress Examination. These various forms of continuous
assessment are also known as “Check-Point Assessments” in Brunei under the ongoing
curriculum reforms.

To minimize on clear confusion, some schools are organizing seminars and


workshops to brief teachers on the possible implications of SPN21 on school
assessments and the various types of assessments that will be used (Clark, 2009). The
cause of unsatisfactory performance on national examinations can be many. For
example, previous research indicates that students who don’t study efficiently do not
usually perform well on tests of academic achievement (Putwain, 2009; Sander, 2009;
Sander & Mercer, 2009). Despite lack of research on students’ poor academic
achievement in some subjects, the need to diagnose and reform school assessments is
apparent from a variety of informal sources.

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