By Denise Fung
Centretown elementary schools are putting greater emphasis on mathematics after receiving low scores on standardized provincial Grade 3 tests.
Principals from Cambridge Street Public School, Elgin Street Public School and McNabb Park Public School say their students need to improve their math skills. Across the province, math was the weakest discipline.
A fourth Centretown school, Centennial, is still interpreting its test results.
Last May, 140,000 Grade 3 students from across the province wrote a five-day test that assessed their reading, writing and math skills. The tests were created by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), a provincially created organization responsible for standardized testing.
At Cambridge Street Public School, Grade 3 students had problems with pattern recognition, algebra and understanding how numbers operate.
In comparison with the district school board average, Barbara Wright, the school’s principal, says Cambridge’s scores were consistently lower in these math skills.
“They stuck out like a sore thumb,” says Wright, pointing to charts showing Cambridge’s test scores lined up next to the school-board averages.
Wright says Cambridge’s high number of English-as-a-second-language students must be considered. Many of the math questions were word problems difficult for some of the ESL students to understand, she says.
Wright says the school plans to improve students’ math abilities by incorporating mathematics into other lessons whenever possible. For example, teachers may reinforce students’ understanding of geometric shapes during an art class or practise pattern recognition in a music lesson.
Elgin Street Public School has also targeted math for improvement.
“The mathematics would appear almost across the board a problem area for us,” said Bill Filleter, co-chair of the school’s advisory council, adding students seem to be weakest in mathematical problem-solving.
Elgin Street fared poorly on the Grade 3 tests; most of the test scores failed to meet the province’s acceptability standard.
Filleter says he looks at the test results as “just a snapshot” of the school’s performance.
He says he believes the test scores will improve after teachers incorporate more problem-solving lessons into their classes, an area he says teachers have overlooked in the past.
Even at McNabb Park Public School, where students scored above the provincial average in most areas of testing, staff have found students are weak in problem-solving abilities.
“The staff felt there needed to be a commitment to help students to learn the language of mathematics,” said Bob Griffith, principal of McNabb Park.
He added McNabb’s test results were skewed by the fact the school has a large gifted-student program. Sixty of the school’s 185 students are enrolled in this program.
Griffith says their students’ problem-solving abilities may be weak because of insufficient emphasis on these skills by teachers, a lack of word problems in textbooks and the loss of teaching time during last year’s ice storm and teachers’ strike.
The EQAO and the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board are interested in how schools plan to fix weaknesses highlighted by the test results.
Principals from schools across the region are expected to submit action plans to the EQAO and the school board by the end of the month.