School performance and factors of public primary education in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: diagnostic assessment report 2011/2012

Vietnam benefited from a diagnostic assessment by the CONFEMEN Programme for the analysis of education systems (PASEC) during the 2011/2012 school year. The assessment consisted of two data collections (in December 2011 and May 2012) in the second and fifth years of primary education. The data collected concerned the pupils, teachers and head teachers, as well as the in-school and out-of-school learning environment. The language of instruction (Vietnamese) and mathematics were assessed during this study. To assess the performance of primary school pupils in Vietnam, PASEC designed tests to measure their progression in oral comprehension, written comprehension, written production, operations and numeration, measurement and geometry. These domains of learning call upon levels of proficiency related to the cognitive processes that are indispensable for pupils to process information in the other fields of learning and in everyday life. This synthesis presents the main conclusions of the assessment.