Students’ Teachers’ and Parents’ Views about Transition from Basic Education to Secondary Education (BESE) System

Abstract

Present research aimed to investigate the views of students, teachers, and parents about the new
system called Transition from Basic Education to Secondary Education (BESE) launched recently in 2013-2014
school year. Convergent parallel mixed research method was used to structure the study. For the quantitative
strand of the research, data were collected from a total of 415 participants including 193 8th grade students,
116 teachers, and 106 parents of 8th grade students. The qualitative data were collected from 5 teachers, 6
students and 6 parents who volunteered to participate into the study. The quantitative data were collected
using a questionnaire and qualitative data were collected using semi-structured interview forms during fall
semester of 2013-2014. Both strands of the study indicated that newly introduced practices such as setting the
exams in students’ own school buildings, extending the exam over two semesters, providing a make-up exam, and
not using correction-for-guessing formula are generally welcomed by the participants especially in terms of
decreasing the exam anxiety and stress. However, results show that the new BESE system seems to fail to
resolve adequately some of the rooted problems regarding the commonly complained need for private teaching
institutions, courses or lessons, and exam security