Most teachers let opportunity slip

Re: “Province’s new digital testing will be optional,” Aug. 31.

The Student Learning Assessments for Grade 3 have been completed with only optional participation required by Alberta Education this fall. Eighty-five per cent of Alberta’s Grade 3 teachers did not participate, thus missing an excellent opportunity for their professional development ( group marking at the school level of students’ work), and crucially, to receive external feedback on the early literacy development of their students.

These data play an impor- tant complementary role in school improvement planning and identifying individual student needs at an early stage in literacy learning. They indicate where instructional attention may need to be focused, for example, in printing, spelling, word recognition and vocabulary use, planning and organizing ideas for writing.

The next opportunity to participate in provincial exams does not come until Grade 6. The best opportunity to intervene and to reset the achievement trajectory is early on. We have plenty of evidence that our youngest learners are not achieving as they should: too few are achieving the standard of excellence, and too many are not making the acceptable standard.

Failure to address this concern early on merely widens the gap over time, making it far more difficult and expensive to remediate. Everyone loses, most of all our youngest learners.

School boards and classroom practitioners need to be reminded of the value of student learning assessment and the many costs of not participating.

Hetty Roessingh, Calgary Hetty Roessingh is a professor at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary