The Cook Islands Ministry of Education (MoE) is encouraged to investigate the decline in year four students’ performance in reading and numeracy over the four cycles of PILNA. A suggestion put forward is that the heads of schools can organise a PD session, where year six teachers are encouraged to empower year four teachers with strategies to lift year four students’ performance.

The MoE is encouraged to investigate and narrow the gap in achievement between boys and girls in numeracy, reading and writing. PILNA has consistently found that girls outperform boys in all the domains. This gender disparity in achievement is a matter of concern, as the pattern has been the same for the last four cycles of PILNA.

The MoE is encouraged again to provide supplementary training for teachers in the development and use of classroom-based informal and formative assessment. Teachers are to identify specific needs of students, tailor instruction to meet these needs and monitor the effectiveness of the instruction to optimise student learning.

The MoE is encouraged to investigate the decline in student performance in reading and writing. This may have contributed to the drop in the performance of students in numeracy, especially in solving problems. A suggestion is to put in place a policy that all schools have a programme where all students drop everything and read, as well as a policy where students write a portfolio item each week and teachers evaluate it. Additional strategies include ensuring there are reading books and materials made available to the students.

The MoE is encouraged to provide training for teachers to develop items that target interpretation of information, critical thinking and problem-solving and to ensure that students are able to positively respond to these types of questions. High order thinking skills are always a challenge to student learning. If students are provided with these types of questions in the classroom and teachers assist the students to arrive at the desirable response, there should be an encouraging result in the next cycle of PILNA.

The MoE is encouraged to undertake further exploration of the PILNA 2021 cognitive and contextual data sets, along with other relevant data sets, to better understand the challenges facing students and teachers in Cook Islands. The findings can be used to target support and intervention in the Cook Islands’ education systems, with the goal of strengthening numeracy, reading and writing instructions leading to improved student learning outcomes.