30 Jun 2020
Doha, 30 June 2020. Aspire Academy has started early preparations towards the new school year by running an assessment for newly enrolled students. Nineteen cadets reported at Aspire Academy on Monday 29 June to take complementary subtests used to measure related cognitive abilities relevant to assessment and identification of specific child's abilities in discrete cognitive domains in Math, English and Arabic. The entire day’s programme was conducted under stringent health and safety precautions in the light of COVID-19 pandemic.
Aspire Academy school Principal, Jassem Al Jaber explained the aim of the exercise saying, “The preparations for each new Aspire Academy’s academic year begins at the end of the last academic year. By selecting new student athletes, we begin to conduct diagnostic or screening tests via Wechsler tests. These are international tests that measure students' skills in math, English and we added to it Arabic language as a basic skill in Aspire school. The goal of this procedure is to assess the student's academic skills in mathematics, English and Arabic.
Of course, identifying these skills helps us plan how their next year learning will look like. Let's say, for example, that a student has a certain weakness in any of the language skills as a result in the upcoming academic year, we will start focusing more on his weakness and try to strengthen this issue on the basis that the boy can familiarize and adapt to Aspire Academy. We do this because, as you know, admission to Aspire Academy is based on a sporting talent ability, and when a student joins the academy, we also like to test his academic skills, and start making plans for him as well as start to develop his skills. The main objective of this test is to identify the basic skills that need to be developed by the student and we will work on developing them during the next academic year.
In this 2020-21 academic year, approximately 70 students were selected. We interviewed them individually online. After these interviews we found about 19 students who needed further assessment and started testing them via Wechsler test, which determines exactly what skills they need to develop in the next academic year,” concluded Principal Jassem