About Scio

Scio is a company full of active, capable, experienced and educated people who not only have a long-term interest in education, but are also professionally involved and respond to new trends that are emerging in this area. They prepared, and are preparing, a number of projects for the general public, parents, children and schools.

 

 

Modern education not only in school! Helping with children's education...

• We want to make the world better. Our role in this is to improve the field of education and development of children.
• We strive to ensure that children and young people are well (better) prepared to live a good and happy life in the second half of the 21st century.
• In order to bring about desirable changes we are trying to shape the society's understanding of the objectives, content, forms, processes and tools of children's education.
• We want to be the ones who draw attention to problems, influence opinions of others and, at the same time, offer a solution.

 

How it started and how it develops further

Scio company was founded in 1995. In the beginning was the idea of Ondřej Šteffl, inspired by experiences from the US, to create professional tests for school entrance exams. The company began as a two-men start-up and, despite a fairly conservative approach and distrust by Czech schools, slowly made them aware that educational measurement is a peculiar field with its own professional standards, methodologies and technologies. Secondary schools which started using the tests in their admissions process were gradually joined by colleges and universities and over the decades "Scio tests" became a phenomenon so strong that it's used in everyday language.

Currently Scio cooperates with Czech schools through dozens of projects; analyses results are used overwhelmingly to improve teaching. Gradually though, the range of products and services expands into entirely new dimensions. These include projects and products for parents and children that focus primarily on the development of skills such as the art of learning, identification and development of strengths, improvement of emotional intelligence and many others (see Learning for Life: parallel education).

Since 2015, Scio is involved in the establishment and operation of innovative elementary schools (ScioSchools).

 

Innovations in the first place - change is a permanent state

Innovation in education is to a great extent demonstrably lacking. Education more or less adapts to trends. We see the need for change, although, due to deep-rooted ideas about education, many find any change surprisingly difficult to accept. Yet. That's why we try to encourage changes by our activities.

 

ScioSchool (ScioŠkola)

ScioSchool demonstrates that school education today can be completely different. That the school can be a setting in which children develop; it supports their desire to learn and responds to their individual needs. The basic principles on which ScioSchool stands are:

Focus on the future: regardless of what the world will be like in 20 years, we are preparing children to find their place in it.

Individual uniqueness: we let children learn in their own way.

Intrinsic motivation: we support the natural joy of learning, no need for good and bad grades.

Personal relations: the child is our partner who we are learning with, not a vessel that we have to fill with knowledge.

ScioSchool is a school,  a completely different school.

www.scioskola.cz

 

Learning for Life: parallel education

Education, especially compulsory education, ceases to meet expectations without it being fully realized by those who, in the interest of their own children, are responsible for it. They are neither the school nor the state, they are the parents. Education doesn't take place only in schools. Increasingly, we often learn the most important things outside of school, and without its involvement. Our whole life. The school still plays an irreplaceable role in the lives of children, but is far from fully covering their education. We want to show parents how important for the development of their children is learning that takes place outside of school, and to offer them concrete solutions. Scio is not only tests. Scio is parallel education.

 

Test of General Academic Prerequisites (GAP)

Test of General Academic Prerequisites or GAP ("Obecné studijní předpoklady - OSP" in Czech) is the first innovation that Scio introduced to Czech education. It brought a new dimension to the assessment of learning outcomes, depending not only on what children learned in school, but also on the prerequisites they have for education.

 

National Comparative Exams (NCE)

National Comparative Exams or NCE ("Národní srovnávací zkoušky - NSZ" in Czech) are certified exams used as a criterion in the acceptance processes of many Czech and Slovak universities and colleges. There are Faculties of Law, Architecture, Economy, Social sciences or Engineering and others among them. NCE are taken by over 25,000 university applicants every year. These tests are administered six times per year, at 30 locations in the Czech Republic and ten locations in Slovakia. Students have the possibility to sit for exams in the following modules: Test of General Academic Prerequisites (GAP), Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, English, and German. Most of the applicants have taken the Test of General Academic Prerequisites (GAP). This test is similar to the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations, see www.ets.org) test model, which has been used in tertiary education in the United States since 1966.
Download more information: NCE - information fact sheet

 

Ianua Linguarum Reserata (Janička)

The project Ianua Linguarum Reserata (Janička) which ended in September 2015 and was presented in collaboration with the British Council, focused on improving the language skills of pupils and teachers in primary schools. Participating schools used CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) in the teaching of "Man and his world" subject, with the help of prepared video lessons.
For more information see https://janicka.scio.cz/Home/Projekt
All materials are available free of charge.