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Ontario’s schools do a bad job of catching young students who have trouble with math and helping them early, the province’s testing agency says, and it’s showing in sixth-graders’ sharply worse performance on tests last year.
Only half of the 124,000 students who took the Education Quality and Accountability Office’s standard math test last school year met the province’s minimum standard, the agency reported Wednesday. The numbers on numbers have never been that great, but that’s a drop of eight percentage points since 2012.
Back in 2008, only 63 per cent of Grade 6s met the provincial standard and now they’re doing much worse. That year, third-graders met the provincial standard for math 70 per cent of the time. Now it’s 63 per cent. These scores are better than in the early 2000s but they’re obviously headed in the wrong direction.
Ninth-graders, the other group the EQAO tests, have kept their math performances steady. Academic-stream Grade 9s meet the provincial standard 83 per cent of the time and applied-stream Grade 9s meet it 45 per cent of the time. That second figure’s not great but at least it’s not getting worse. We’d be wrong, though, to assume some junior-high magic will rescue the Grade 6s’ poor math skills by the time they get to Grade 9.
Math is a useful skill just on its own merits — everyone should know how a mortgage works, be able to calculate area and volume, figure out which roll of aluminum foil is the best deal. An educated person should be able to execute some algebra and calculus, know what makes a parabola interesting, be able to evaluate statistical claims.
Practically, people who are comfortable with mathematical modes of thought are a lot more employable than people who aren’t. If you want a high-paying job, it helps to be able to work a spreadsheet.
The Ontario government began treating young students’ math weakness as a really serious problem in 2014. Under then-education minister Liz Sandals, who has a master’s degree in mathematics, school boards pushed more math into teachers’ professional-development days and thousands of teachers took brush-up courses on math instruction. The province extended standard teachers’ college from one year to two.
The problem, Sandals emphasized, isn’t particularly with arithmetic and times tables and things kids learn by drilling — it’s with more advanced material like word problems and abstract concepts.
Last April, Sandals said elementary students would get an hour of daily math instruction. (Quebec’s students do the best in math on national tests and also spend the most time on it; there’s probably a connection.) She pledged $60 million for tutoring and outreach to parents to help them help their kids.
You wouldn’t expect those moves to produce instant results (the two-year education programs won’t graduate anyone till next year; the one-hour minimum for math time begins with this school year), but you’d hope the decline the EQAO has recorded for years might have slowed. Nope.
Here’s the good news. The agency tests reading and writing abilities and those have improved steadily.
“Ontario’s school system has been getting better at the early identification and support of students who are not meeting literacy expectations,” says the EQAO’s most recent report. It can monitor individual students’ scores from test to test and see that more than half of the kids who miss the mark in Grade 3 are hitting it in Grade 6. Even better, the rate of improvement is itself improving.
“EQAO results show that the years of effort and attention given to improving language instruction programs in Ontario’s publicly funded school system have had a significant impact on student success,” says the agency’s chair Dave Cooke, who was a New Democrat education minister under Bob Rae and head of an education-reform commission under Mike Harris. “That kind of system-wide mobilization has been the model for what’s needed to improve student achievement in math.”
System-wide mobilization does not come cheaply. The province has limited money and the school day has only so many minutes in it, so we’re really talking about dividing up finite resources differently. The trick, which we evidently have not yet figured out how to pull off, is shoring up our math classes without giving up all we’ve gained in literacy.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Only half of the 124,000 students who took the Education Quality and Accountability Office’s standard math test last school year met the province’s minimum standard, the agency reported Wednesday. The numbers on numbers have never been that great, but that’s a drop of eight percentage points since 2012.
Back in 2008, only 63 per cent of Grade 6s met the provincial standard and now they’re doing much worse. That year, third-graders met the provincial standard for math 70 per cent of the time. Now it’s 63 per cent. These scores are better than in the early 2000s but they’re obviously headed in the wrong direction.
Ninth-graders, the other group the EQAO tests, have kept their math performances steady. Academic-stream Grade 9s meet the provincial standard 83 per cent of the time and applied-stream Grade 9s meet it 45 per cent of the time. That second figure’s not great but at least it’s not getting worse. We’d be wrong, though, to assume some junior-high magic will rescue the Grade 6s’ poor math skills by the time they get to Grade 9.
Math is a useful skill just on its own merits — everyone should know how a mortgage works, be able to calculate area and volume, figure out which roll of aluminum foil is the best deal. An educated person should be able to execute some algebra and calculus, know what makes a parabola interesting, be able to evaluate statistical claims.
Practically, people who are comfortable with mathematical modes of thought are a lot more employable than people who aren’t. If you want a high-paying job, it helps to be able to work a spreadsheet.
The Ontario government began treating young students’ math weakness as a really serious problem in 2014. Under then-education minister Liz Sandals, who has a master’s degree in mathematics, school boards pushed more math into teachers’ professional-development days and thousands of teachers took brush-up courses on math instruction. The province extended standard teachers’ college from one year to two.
The problem, Sandals emphasized, isn’t particularly with arithmetic and times tables and things kids learn by drilling — it’s with more advanced material like word problems and abstract concepts.
Last April, Sandals said elementary students would get an hour of daily math instruction. (Quebec’s students do the best in math on national tests and also spend the most time on it; there’s probably a connection.) She pledged $60 million for tutoring and outreach to parents to help them help their kids.
You wouldn’t expect those moves to produce instant results (the two-year education programs won’t graduate anyone till next year; the one-hour minimum for math time begins with this school year), but you’d hope the decline the EQAO has recorded for years might have slowed. Nope.
Here’s the good news. The agency tests reading and writing abilities and those have improved steadily.
“Ontario’s school system has been getting better at the early identification and support of students who are not meeting literacy expectations,” says the EQAO’s most recent report. It can monitor individual students’ scores from test to test and see that more than half of the kids who miss the mark in Grade 3 are hitting it in Grade 6. Even better, the rate of improvement is itself improving.
“EQAO results show that the years of effort and attention given to improving language instruction programs in Ontario’s publicly funded school system have had a significant impact on student success,” says the agency’s chair Dave Cooke, who was a New Democrat education minister under Bob Rae and head of an education-reform commission under Mike Harris. “That kind of system-wide mobilization has been the model for what’s needed to improve student achievement in math.”
System-wide mobilization does not come cheaply. The province has limited money and the school day has only so many minutes in it, so we’re really talking about dividing up finite resources differently. The trick, which we evidently have not yet figured out how to pull off, is shoring up our math classes without giving up all we’ve gained in literacy.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
