Canadian Grade 8 students performing well in math and science, new report says

There’s some good news in the latest Pan-Canadian Assessment Program report on how Canadian junior-high students are performing in the core learning areas of reading, mathematics and science.

But the 2013 report issued Tuesday by the Canadian Ministers of Education Council (CMEC) also suggests there’s a disturbing gap in some provinces on the quality of education for students in minority francophone or anglophone school systems.

First the good news: The survey last year of 32,000 Grade 8 students (called Secondary II in Quebec) at 1,500 schools in the 10 provinces showed the vast majority – 91 per cent – were reaching the expected goals in science, the main focus of this year’s report, with more than half exceeding those targets.

“The results of this assessment suggest that Canadian jurisdictions are addressing the demands and practices in science, and that the majority of students have attained a level of scientific literacy that enables them to use their knowledge and skills in practical day-to-day activities,” the report concludes.

“Scientific literacy is an essential part of what it means to be an educated and engaged citizen in the 21st century,” Alberta Education Minister Gordon Dirks, the current CMEC chairman, said in a news release.

“Today’s results confirm that our education systems are providing young people a strong foundation in the scientific knowledge and skills needed to make sense of the natural world and our place within it.”

The report is based on a 90-minute test designed to assess students’ skills in the core areas, regardless of differences in curriculum from province to province, to determine whether students across the country are reaching similar levels of performance at about the same age.

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The results are encouraging, CMEC director general Andrew Parkin, said in an interview with Yahoo Canada News.

“I think it demonstrates that the systems across the country are solid,” he said. “But I think there’s no minister in the country who wouldn’t say that there isn’t more work to be done.

“If nine out of 10 are performing at the expected level, one out of 10 is not and that’s a concern.”

Performance in math improved between last year and the previous survey in 2010, while reading results, which declined in 2010, returned to 2007 levels.

And in a world where girls often feel discouraged about pursuing interests in math and science, the report showed no significant performance difference between Grade 8 girls and boys in those subjects. In reading, girls continue to out-perform boys in all provinces, the survey found.

“It’s particularly catching people’s attention because there are issues with the number of girls and young women who will pursue science careers,” said Parkin.

“What we’re saying with this report is if you roll back to where they are as they enter their teenage years, the situation’s quite positive. You’ve got a great foundation to build on.”

Things can change when girls head into their final couple of years of high school, Parkin said. Interest and aptitude for math and science remain the same but desire to enrol in science, engineering or math programs at university that can lead to professional careers can wane.

“That’s one way of putting it in saying that’s not where the issue lies; the issue lies in the trajectory after that point,” he said.

Things get a little murkier when it comes to performance in Canada’s two official languages.

The survey found that in science and reading, students attending English-language school systems outperformed those in French-language systems while the opposite was true when it came to math performance (the results do not refer to immersion programs offered by English-language systems).

“For those provinces in which there is a significant difference in achievement between the English- and French-language systems in science and reading, students in majority-language systems outperform those in minority-language systems, except in New Brunswick, where francophone students have higher achievement in reading,” the report says.

“In mathematics, students in the French-language system outperform those in the English-language systems in all jurisdictions in which there is a significant difference except in Ontario, where anglophone students achieve results that are higher than francophone students.”

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Parkin said the summary reflects the overall national trend but there are differences in the core learning areas between jurisdictions because the results are weighted to account for bigger provinces that affect the averages.

Discovering just why these gaps exist – provincial funding, fewer learning materials, a smaller pool of minority-language teachers, etc. – will require more analysis, Parkin said.

“I think the ministers would say there’s a good allocation of resources but it’s just the reality,” he said.

English-language school systems in anglophone Canada, for instance, probably have an easier time acquiring acquiring math and science teaching resources developed in the United States and Britain.

“In the francophone system (outside Quebec) it can often be much trickier,” said Parkin. “It’s not so much are they allocated resources but just basic economies of scale, of supporting smaller systems.”

The CMEC exists in part to help systems identify and work on common problems like this, he said. What are systems that buck the trend doing right that can be shared nationwide?

“We do actually support a number of projects around French-language curriculum and teaching resources precisely because they’re smaller systems,” said Parkin. “If they are all off developing their own tools it would be quite expensive.”