Ontario Grade 8 students test above average in survey

National assessment program fills in for cancelled EQAO

With assessments by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) cancelled during the pandemic, Ontario parents have been left in the dark about how kids in the province are faring in school.

Fortunately for them, the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP), which tests tens of thousands of Grade 8 students across the country every three years, has just made its latest results public.

Ontario students performed above average in all three categories of the test — math, reading and science. Ontarians achieved the highest average score in reading of all the provinces and joined Alberta and Prince Edward Island as the only other provinces to have science scores above the Canadian mean.

In math, Ontario had the second highest mean score, slightly above the national score but below Quebec’s score.

The assessment, undertaken in 2019, found 90 per cent of Canadian Grade 8 students displayed “baseline proficiency” in math, which requires a test-taker to “demonstrate the competencies needed to participate effectively in reallife situations related to mathematics.”

To get these results, the PCAP, run by the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), tested around 30,000 Grade 8 students from close to 1,600 schools nationwide in math, reading and science. Math was the focus that year, meaning more math questions were present on the test relative to the other two areas of assessment.

The PCAP found that students enrolled in francophone schools did better in math than those in anglophone schools. However, the opposite was observed for the reading and science categories, in which they performed worse.

“We do not currently have an explanation as to why students in francophone and anglophone schools perform differently,” said Chantale LeClerc, executive director of the CMEC. She added that “further analysis on contextual factors” may assist them in understanding why in the future.

The test also found that girls performed better in reading than boys in all provinces. In science, girls performed better than boys in five provinces, Saskatchewan, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. Girls and boys performed similarly in math throughout the country.

“We are not planning to conduct further analysis on science and reading performance at this time,” said LeClerc. “However, we will be undertaking additional analysis of some background variables that may help explain the differences in performance in mathematics.”

A forthcoming report, “PCAP 2019: Contextual Report on Student Achievement in Mathematics,” is in the works, LeClerc said, which will explore how “resources and school and classroom conditions, as well as student characteristics and family circumstances, may impact mathematics achievement among Grade 8/Secondary II students.”

The PCAP is designed to consider factors such as linguistic differences, rural and urban school locations, and cultural influences in its assessments. While the test questions are being designed, LeClerc explains that experts review the content to make sure that there are no biases that might favour some students over others.

Participating students, as well as their teachers and principals, complete questionnaires that are “designed to provide contextual information to aid in the interpretation of the test scores,” said LeClerc.

“Because the primary domain of the 2019 PCAP assessment was mathematics, contextual questions addressed factors that have been found in past studies to correlate with mathematics achievement,” she said.

Examples of these include: “parental level of education, language spoken in the home, the number of books in the home, students’ attitudes and beliefs, students’ learning experiences, and support for student learning.”

The contextual questionnaires given to teachers delve further, inquiring about “teaching and learning conditions, including teachers’ homework expectations, assessment practices, areas of specialization, and years of teaching experience.”

The version of the questionnaire given to school principals asks about the “structure and organization of the school, school climate, school policies and practices, and curriculum and instruction.”

One final bit of good news from the assessment, this time for all students, is that achievement in all three categories, reading, math and science, increased across the board since previous tests. Math and reading results increased 10 and five points respectively since 2010, and science scores increased four points since 2013.

Though LeClerc was unable to say whether performance would continue to increase, she did attribute this most recent success to individual provinces and territories’ learning initiatives.

“Provinces and territories are working hard to provide students with a highquality education,” she said.

The Pan-Canadian Assessment

Program considers factors such as linguistic differences, rural and urban locations and cultural influences