No-calculator test reveals Grade 6 math woes: Eggen

Grade 6 students did poorly on a new no-calculator portion of provincial mathematics exams, Alberta’s education minister said Tuesday.

Last fall, concerned about children’s grasp of math fundamentals, David Eggen introduced a new 15-minute, 15-question section to the math exam written by all sixth graders across the province.

“And there it was. Boom. Big place for room for improvement for basic skills,” Eggen said Tuesday after the education ministry released its 2016-17 provincial exam results.

Nearly one-quarter of sixth graders failed the math provincial achievement test (PAT) they wrote last spring, according to ministry data. It was the exam’s lowest pass rate in the last five years. Nearly 45,000 preteens wrote the exam in the last school year.

About one-third of students failed the no-calculator portion of the exam, he said.

Eggen said he expected to see poor results on the no-calculator portion of the test. He hopes other measures government and school boards have taken to improve math education will prompt those results to climb in subsequent years.

Last year, Eggen modified the elementary math curriculum to require students to learn times tables and step-by-step methods for addition and subtraction.

A complete review and re-writing of Alberta’s K-12 curriculum in English and French will also add more emphasis on numeracy skills, he said. However, the K-4 curriculum rewrite won’t be finished until next year, and the government has no rollout date yet.

In December 2016, Eggen announced a new $2,000 bursary for teachers taking post-secondary training to bolster their math teaching skills. About 200 teachers have used the program so far, he said.

Eggen hopes teachers will also take less intensive professional development to improve their methods.

In November 2018, some written questions and answers will return to Grade 12 math diploma exams, which are currently all multiplechoice questions.

After introducing early math intervention tests a few years ago, Edmonton Public Schools’ superintendent Darrel Robertson had hoped students’ PAT scores would rise. Scores dropped last year in Grade 6 and 9 exams, but diploma grades rose.

At a news conference Tuesday, Robertson questioned whether the time limit on the no-calculator questions put pressure on students.

“Of course our kids need to be skilled with the basics in mathematics to do well, and they need to be challenged in terms of problem-solving, and those higher-level thinking skills in mathematics,” Robertson said.

The average mark for Alberta Grade 9 students writing the math provincial achievement test last school year was 58.9 per cent, which was down from the 61.9 per cent average the previous year.

Results from the Math 30-1 diploma exams were more encouraging, with scores and the pass rate climbing slightly from last year. However, the 2017 pass rate of 73.1 per cent is still nearly eight percentage points lower than the 2013 pass rate.

Students fared better in sciences. Grades and the pass rate hit a fiveyear high for the Chemistry 30 and Physics 30 diploma exams.

Edmonton Catholic Schools released district-level numbers showing its students’ PAT pass rates exceeded the provincial averages in 12 of 14 subjects. The district’s diploma exam pass rates exceeded the provincial average in all subjects except biology, chemistry and physics.

Edmonton Public Schools said their students exceeded PAT and diploma exam pass rates in 17 of 21 subjects.