Northern Lights Public Schools (NLPS) board of trustees discussed the impacts the returning Grade 3 Provincial Achievement Tests (PATs) could have on the division.
Superintendent Rick Cusson told the board during their meeting on Wednesday, June 26, NLPS received notification from Alberta’s Deputy Minister of Education, Curtis Clarke, in an email the Grade 3 PATs will be reimplemented in schools across the province.
”As far as when that will be happening, they want to do their curriculum review before they start bringing that piece out,” said Cusson.
The email also noted the Grade 3 Student Learning Assessments (SLAs), which is currently optional, would be made mandatory in the fall of 2020, and would remain in place until the PATs are re-instituted.
As NLPS currently doesn’t participate in the SLAs, they could face issues when preparing their schools to take them.
”I’m a little bit concerned about the transition to an assessment that we haven’t run our teachers through, or trained our teachers on,” explained Cusson.
When the SLAs were first introduced, there was assistance provided through the province in order to help teachers adjust to the additional work.
”They indicate that we shouldn’t expect additional financial resources,” explained associate superintendent for teaching and student learning Jimmi Lou Irvine. “We would have to sort through the training and marking component of it internally.”
With the late notification from the province, Cusson noted NLPS would have had to notify staff much earlier if they were planning on integrating the SLAs for the 2019/20 year.
Similar to the Grade 6 and Grade 9 PATs, parents have the option to exempt their child from the Grade 3 tests if they choose to. Through the results, Cusson said, NLPS gets “some really good data on how we’re moving forward” when it comes to their curriculum.
”We highly encourage our parents to be involved in the writing of the PATs, because it’s a good report measure for us and it’s a good report card for us on how we’re doing,” he continued. “We can get information out of those PATs that show trends across our system, and help us address potential deficiencies in our teacher practices.”
While students can be taken out of the standardized tests, Irvine noted it has an effect on NLPS’ results.
”When you opt a student out, they automatically receive a zero. That will really skew any data that we use across our division,” Irvine said.
Trustee Garry Kissel saw that as an issue that came up previously when the information was released.
”We stressed very highly that we take the exams, and only in rare cases would we like to allow exemptions. Other boards just exempted people left and right, and they were so skewed,” he said.
The board will discuss Grade 3 PATs and SLAs further when more information becomes available.
