This text is part of the special Literacy notebook
Starting this school year, Alberta’s youngest students will be regularly given standardized literacy and numeracy tests to help teachers measure their skills. While such assessments exist in Quebec, experts say they would be difficult to standardize in the province.
In Alberta, children in kindergarten through grade 5e primary school students will have to take regular literacy and numeracy tests, through standardized tests by the Alberta Ministry of Education. These exams already existed in the western province, but were not standardized across all school boards. Their frequency is also being increased. “It is used for diagnostic purposes to check if students are up to par or if there are weaknesses, learning or cognitive disorders,” summarizes Samira ElAtia, a specialist in skills assessment and language assessment and vice-dean of graduate studies at the Saint-Jean campus of the University of Alberta.
Such an initiative will make it possible to draw up a portrait of the knowledge and gaps among certain children, adds M.me ElAtia. “After the pandemic, we saw a lot of work that showed that there was a decline in literacy for several reasons, especially among the youngest. Isolation caused a drop in their performance,” she observes.
Standardizing these tests also aims, and above all, to ensure that Alberta schools assess students according to the same reading and writing standards, continues the specialist.
An initiative that can be implemented in Quebec?
Such tests already exist in Quebec classrooms. But unlike those used in Alberta, they are not harmonized and are therefore the responsibility of educational institutions or school service centres, explains Catherine Turcotte, professor in the Department of Specialized Education and Training at the Université du Québec à Montréal. “Sometimes, teachers develop materials. They can be tools from the school or the service centre, but we don’t have a provincial assessment,” she explains.
The co-holder of the Reading, Writing, Discovering Research Chair is not convinced that such standardization of tests would be beneficial for Quebec students. According to her, an initiative of this nature must either have solid theoretical validity or accurately determine the skills measured. It is also a matter of ensuring that the test does indeed assess these skills adequately. The level of the exam must also be adequate: neither too easy nor too difficult, in order to allow for a fair measurement of students’ knowledge. Mme Turcotte finally highlights the disparity in academic skills between populations of children in different regions of Quebec and within schools themselves.
“What is important with this type of test is that it can provide information to the teacher on the students’ knowledge. If we had a uniform test from one end of the province to the other, it would not be sensitive enough to understand or determine the achievements of many of them,” she argues. She points out that Quebec-wide exams are already taking place in 4e and in 6e elementary school year. “Should we have them all year long? I doubt it,” she says.
Improving literacy
The key to improving students’ reading and writing skills lies primarily in the expertise of teachers and not in the tests that evaluate them, believes Catherine Turcotte. “Not every test is relevant to everyone, it’s impossible. Even if they are the same age,” she says.
So, she believes that teachers need to be trained to analyze the data collected in these tests in order to identify children who need additional intervention. “But that requires teachers who have a lot of knowledge about spelling and grammar, in particular. There is no miracle,” says the researcher.
For her part, if Samira ElAtia believes that diagnostic tests in Alberta are a good initiative to detect the challenges of certain students, she nevertheless fears a lack of resources once certain deficiencies are targeted.
“Once we have these results, what are we going to put in place? With what support? Will there be resources?” she wonders. She also points out that the Alberta government has cut teaching positions for the start of the school year despite an increase in the provincial budget allocated to education. “A school principal or a teacher who needs to help a child, will they have the necessary resources? That’s what worries me,” says the researcher, who hopes that schools will have access to enough educational psychologists, teacher assistants and solutions to allow more vulnerable families to obtain books and reading materials. “We shouldn’t take the test alone into consideration, because it will simply confirm the student’s level. It’s good to know [les résultats]but it’s what I do with it that’s important.”
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