Abstract:

Spain has gone from being a country of emigration to an immigration one in the last decades, and this transformation has made a clear impact on the education system, especially in those regions (comunidades autónomas) in which the reception of foreign citizens has been larger. This is the case of Catalonia, a territory with seven and a half million inhabitants, and 782,471 compulsory education students between 6 and 16 years old, of which 94,479 have a migrant background (12.07% of the total).

The Spanish educational system in Catalonia is inclusive, therefore newly arrived students are not segregated from the mainstream but integrated into an ordinary school from the very first day, and they are provided with the necessary supports so that such school integration might be successful.

One of the most problematic current issues is the assessment of the prior learning of these students when they land in an ordinary school. On the one hand, the system provides standardized tests that are endorsed by experts in the field. They are carried out individually and the outputs of this assessment are useful to make an individualized learning plan for the student. The system also allows an internal organizational flexibility of the school to manage some other assessment resources.

However, there are numerous factors that negatively affect the development of the schooling of these newly arrived students: one of them the need to update the tests of assessment for prior learning, since they date from 2004 and have not changed since then. Another deficit is that the tests assess the reading and the writing in the language of origin, but if the newly arrived student is illiterate and only knows the language of origin orally, these tests are insufficient.

To learn more about the strengths and the weaknesses of this system of prior learning assessment, and to make proposals for improvement, we have carried out an exploratory research that has included the participation of politicians, experts and teachers. The data collection technique has been the semi-structured interview. The methodological instrument used (the questionnaire for the interview) has been elaborated and validated within the framework of the SIRIUS 2.0 project, a contract between the European Commission and the European association SIRIUS, a network of experts in educational policies addressed to students with a migrant background or belonging to minorities .

From the qualitative information obtained, and through an analysis of content, the questions about the current reality of the assessment of prior learning of newly arrived students have been cleared up, and proposals for improvement have been made, which include recommendations such as opening the assessment of prior learning to meaningful contexts for the newly arrived students, involving families in the assessment of linguistic competences, or considering the relevant differences that exist according to the cultural and linguistic background of these students when being assessed.

Keywords:

Prior learning, assessment, newly arrived students, school integration.