Chinook pleased with overall math marks

Students in the Chinook School Division continue to meet or exceed expectations in math according to a math assessment report presented to the Chinook School Division’s Board of Education during their September 10 meeting.

The report which compiled testing results for students in Grade 3, 6 and 9, reported that a full 78.0 per cent of students were meeting or exceeding expectations in math. That assessment total is a new division high, increasing 1.6 per cent from 2017, and a leap of 31.4 per cent from since their first data collection in 2011.

“We are as high as we’ve been, ever, in terms of our scores in math. With our assessment we’re at 78 per cent, that’s up a bit from last year, and significant since 2011. So I think we’re trending the right direction,” explained Chinook’s Math Coordinator Ed Varjassy.

Chinook embarked on a Math Momentum educational focus starting in 2011 to improve overall math scores by 25 per cent over a four year period. They reached their improvement goal during the third year of their four year plan which concluded at the end of the 2015 school year. Math had subsequently moved into a maintenance phase over the past three years, where results have remained steady.

“We see the trends. We’re very consistent year to year in terms of what we’re seeing with it,” Varjassy said.

“Our maintenance focus is on bringing any of our new teachers into the system, or new to teaching math, some of the tools and the principles in terms of guided math framework so that they’re doing the same things that everyone else is doing.”

Of the three grades which were assessed, Varjassy questions the lower total of Grade 9 students who have achieved exceeding or meeting expectation levels.

“We don’t use the assessment to give them a mark. This assessment is just to verify their level of understanding. So their is no mark assigned to their report cards from this. So it’s not high stakes. So they’re not necessarily producing what they can.”

“I think if we look at the other classroom assessments that teachers do, our Grade 9 math students are doing fairly well.”

This year Chinook will be embarking on a new provincial initiative to look at math achievements in Grades 2, 5 and 8 to assess the success of students based on the Ministry of Education’s Education Sector Strategic Plan.