ASSESSMENT OF THE QUALITY OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION OF EIGHTH-GRADERS IN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

In order to evaluate the results of the transition of Russian secondary schools to the new Federal State Educational Standard and to determine the quality of training of eighth-graders in chemistry, since 2020 the Russian Federation has been conducting All-Russian testing works (ARTW). The results of the ARTW, together with the information available in the general education organization that reflects the individual educational trajectories of students, can be used to assess personal learning outcomes.Tasks of the ARTW in chemistry for eight-graders are aimed at checking the following subject requirements of students: (a) formation of initial systematized ideas about substances, their transformations and practical application; mastering the conceptual apparatus and symbolic language of chemistry;(b) awareness of the objective significance of the foundations of chemical science as a field of modern natural science, chemical transformations of inorganic and organic substances as the basis of many phenomena of living and inanimate nature; deepening of ideas about the material unity of the world;(c) mastering the basics of chemical literacy: the ability to analyze and objectively assess life situations related to chemistry, the skills of safe handling of substances used in everyday life; the ability to analyze and plan environmentally safe behavior in order to preserve health and the environment;(d) the formation of skills to establish links between actually observed chemical phenomena and processes occurring in the microcosm, to explain the reasons for the diversity of substances, the dependence of their properties on the composition and structure, as well as the dependence of the use of substances on their properties;(e) gaining experience in the use of various methods of studying substances: observing their transformations during simple chemical experiments using laboratory equipment;(f) formation of ideas about the importance of chemical science in solving modern environmental problems, including the prevention of man-made and environmental disasters.In addition to the subject-specific learning outcomes of schoolchildren, the ARTW also evaluate meta-subject results, including the level of formation of the following universal learning activities:(a) regulatory actions (goal setting, planning, control and correction, self-regulation),(b) general educational actions (search and selection of necessary information; conscious and arbitrary construction of speech utterances in writing; selection of the most effective ways to solve problems depending on specific conditions, etc.),(c) logical universal actions (analysis of objects in order to identify features; establishing causal relationships; building a logical chain of reasoning; etc.), and(d) communicative actions (the ability to express your thoughts with sufficient completeness and accuracy in accordance with the tasks and conditions of communication).Last year, 391,203 students from 14,515 educational institutions from all 85 subjects of the Russian Federation took part in writing the ARTW in chemistry.This article discusses in detail the structure of the ARTW. The statistical analysis of the results is carried out. The possibilities of graphical representation of the results of the ARTW to identify possible falsifications are demonstrated. It is shown that the broad capabilities of the ARTW can serve to improve the quality of Russian chemical education.