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aving dropped the national exams as a prerequisite for graduation, the Culture and Education and Ministry is still searching for a new way to measure students'€™ knowledge and their learning environment.

The head of the ministry'€™s research and development unit, Totok Amin Soefijanto, said on Thursday that urgent reform was essential especially after the 2013 curriculum was nixed earlier this year.

However, Totok emphasized that an assessment method was not only needed to measure children'€™s knowledge but also to see whether they had gained life skills deemed essential for the 21st century, such as critical thinking, creativity and communication.

'€œWe have to figure out how to create an assessment that will not only measure the competency [of our students] but also improve learning. We cannot just rely on the UN [national exams] as a benchmark,'€ he said at an event at the ministry'€™s headquarters in South Jakarta.

Totok explained that one of the reasons why reform was so urgent was the impending demographic bonus that is predicted to occur in 2025-2035, when the number of people within the productive age bracket is higher than the number of the elderly and children.

The ministry'€™s data shows that currently there are around 106 million children of elementary and secondary schooling age out of 256 million people nationwide.

The same data shows that currently 60 million of these 106 million children are students.

'€œThere are 106 million people of schooling age, that'€™s almost 50 percent of the whole population. However, this potential cannot become a reality if they do not become competent people. No matter how long they stay in school, if they don'€™t get a good education then they could become unproductive as well,'€ he said.

Totok noted that currently 6 percent of all schools nationwide were permitted to continue with the 2013 curriculum. These schools would form the basis of evaluation to draft a new curriculum and new assessment system.

'€œWe will not just rely on the national exams. Hopefully we can assess students through quizzes or school assessments or external standardized tests that will not be a final exam but will just check for competency,'€ he said.

A researcher from the Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research (BEAR) Center of the University of California Berkeley, Mark Wilson, said the Indonesian government must bear four points in mind when creating a new assessment system.

'€œThere are four points that an education system must fulfill. First, assessment must be done based on student learning. Second, [the government] has to figure out if what is being taught is clear and understandable. Third, the teacher must become a manager and use assessment data, and the final point is that in-class assessment must follow a standard of validity and reliability,'€ he said.

Although standardized testing had its positive points, Wilson explained, it might not improve the education system or learning experience as it relied mostly on countable data.

Meanwhile, an elementary school teacher from Jambi urged the government to set different standards for children in the cities and remote areas as it was difficult for the latter to catch up due to limited access and resources.

'€œCan [the government] please differentiate between students in remote areas and those in the cities who have access to the Internet. Sometimes it is difficult just to get cell phone reception,'€ said Tri Hardjanti, a teacher at Jambi'€™s elementary school SDN Pinang Belai, adding that teachers in remote areas often had to travel long hours to cities just to obtain school materials.