Many Canadian children struggle learning to read. We can do more to help them.

Opinion: Published in Toronto Star, 29 April, 2022

Many Canadian children struggle learning to read. We can do more to help them | The Star

We are failing our students. Despite living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, at least one-quarter of our children are struggling and vulnerable because they cannot read by Grade 3, a particularly critical stage in education when children move from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”

Shockingly, this has been the situation for over 20 years as Canadian literacy rates remain stagnant.

Most students who are struggling readers at the end of primary school continue to have learning problems into lower and senior secondary school and fall further and further behind. They are also prone to engaging in a range of risky behaviours, having low self-esteem, and experiencing anxiety and depression. Students who do not learn to read proficiently by the end of the third grade are less likely to graduate from secondary school.

Enter the pandemic, and its associated disruptions, including long absences from the classroom, and the question becomes: Has the pandemic made our children even more vulnerable?

Yes. We believe it has.

Although there is currently little data as to how the pandemic is affecting children and learning, preliminary information from the Toronto District School Board revealed a nine-percentage point drop in Grade 1 student reading levels for those learning online, and a three-percentage point drop for those learning in person.

Clearly, we need to look at our approach to how we are teaching kids to read in kindergarten to Grade 3. We need a new plan to help our students recover from the pandemic or they, and we as a country, will continue to fall behind.

The recently released Right to Read report from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, initiated in pre-COVID times, was deeply critical of the way in which reading is taught in the elementary school system. The comprehensive report includes 157 recommendations to effect change.

It calls for a phonics-based approach, based on the science of reading, to instruction in which children sound out words rather than the current approach, “three-cuing,” in which students learn to read, mostly, by looking at pictures and guessing the word. It is the right call and is evidence-based.

The so-called “reading wars” – phonics versus “three-cuing” – have been fought for at least 50 years. It’s time for a truce. It’s time to develop a new plan. Let’s change our focus to phonics and support our teachers and school principals to help them adopt a new way of teaching reading.

But transforming schools requires more than a government edict. It requires a concerted effort by educational leaders to change the organizational practices of schools and strengthen teacher capacity. It requires the ongoing support of teachers to adopt new approaches of teaching and learning.

School districts that have embarked on large-scale programs to transform their schools have found that it usually takes three to five years. Transforming schools requires a singular focus on literacy skills during the elementary school years. Teachers need to be involved in the change process, and superintendents and principals need to drive that change. Students learn at a faster pace when parents and caregivers are engaged in their children’s literacy development.

A realistic and attainable goal is to reduce levels of childhood vulnerability in Canada from the current level of about 30 per cent to 20 per cent in five years.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission’s inquiry “is not just about an equal right to read – it is about an equal right to a future.”

The Right to Read report has set the right course for change.

And COVID has given us this moment. Let’s not waste it.

Doug Willms is the Founder and President of The Learning Bar Inc. and professor emeritus at the University of New Brunswick. Since receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1983, he has published over three hundred research articles and monographs pertaining to educational reforms.

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Early Years Evaluation - Direct Assessment - Child with caregiver

Educator Insights videos: Sharing knowledge and expertise


We have recently completed a series of interviews with our wonderful customers to explore their experiences of using The Learning Bar solutions. We are proud to share these Educator Insights videos with you.

Find out how educators are using the Confident Learners Literacy Program to make meaningful gains in student literacy and graduation rates and how the Early Years Evaluation and OurSCHOOL are being used to better meet the needs of children, families and educators.

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Literacy Development

Find out what other educators are doing to improve graduation rates and how they are using data to make meaningful gains in literacy development.

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Early Years Development

Hear educators discuss how they are using their EYE data to inform classroom instruction and put appropriate interventions in place as children prepare for kindergarten.

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School Improvement and Planning

Watch video testimonials from educators discussing how they are achieving positive and practical change in their schools to create an environment where all students can thrive.

Contact us if you would like to find out more.

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Blog - Educational Prosperity - Looking Beyond Equality to Equity

Educational Prosperity: Looking Beyond Equality to Equity.

By J. Douglas Willms, President of The Learning Bar Inc.

The educational prosperity framework that I introduced in a recent blog provides an essential structure for understanding the holistic and cumulative ways that children develop, learn and thrive. The benefits of the framework are hardly theoretical: they provide an important and practical guide for ways that monitoring data can—and should—be used to create smarter and more effective policies to help young people thrive.

It’s time to rethink our policy model until now, for no other reason than the less-than-impressive stagnation of global reading scores over the last 15 years. The educational prosperity framework advocates for reliance on monitoring data, as well as a frequent—and early—collection of indicators. These can be used to target policies at the local and national level that bring us closer towards the global education goal (SDG 4). We need to move away from a cause-and-effect model that tries to attribute outcomes to a specific intervention and instead recognize that multiple, nonlinear events lead to change. As education practitioners from around the world meet next week in Hamburg for the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML), it is critical to focus on the link between the smart use of data and policies that provide an opportunity for all.

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Effective Feedback is More Than Just Correcting Student Work: How to give better feedback to improve student learning

Teachers have never-ending opportunities to provide feedback to students. Amidst all the different sources of feedback students receive, neither marks or grades have the biggest impact on student learning. These matter, but they give students little information as to how they can increase their learning or demonstrate more accurately what they have learned. Written and in-person feedback that is specific to the task at hand has the greatest impact on improving learning outcomes.[1] Feedback, when done well, has a powerful influence on student learning.[2] In fact, research suggests that spending slightly less time teaching in order to provide more constructive feedback increases student learning.[3]

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Blog - Educational Prosperity - Helping Countries Provide Foundational Learning for All

The Educational Prosperity Framework: Helping Countries Provide Foundational Learning for All

By J. Douglas Willms, President of The Learning Bar Inc.

On World Teachers Day, this blog presents an assessment framework, called Education Prosperity, that can be used to track the success of teachers, families, communities and public institutions in developing children’s cognitive skills and their social, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being.

As the president of the International Academy of Education, I am often invited to share ideas about school reforms. During a recent trip to Latin America, I found myself in a discussion focused on classroom improvements as a way to boost PISA scores. The conversation was illuminating, because the policymakers in that room—like so many others around the globe— had the best of intentions, but were nevertheless stuck in a model that had them looking in the wrong places.

As I told the group, the foundations for learning are established years before students sit down for the PISA exam or even enter a classroom. In a country that suffers from maternal and child malnutrition, where that particular meeting had taken place, understanding the ways that achievements in education are interconnected—and cumulative— is key to making policy changes that ensure our children are thriving.

These interactions form the basis of my new paper published by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Learning Divides: Using Data to Inform Educational Policy. As the international education community prepares for the upcoming meeting of the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (17-18 October in Hamburg), understanding the interconnectedness of children’s learning processes is critical to measuring progress towards key SDG 4 targets.

Understanding and using data to inform policy

Despite our best attempts, students’ reading skills have not improved over the past fifteen years and if we are to move forward and make real progress, we need a better way of understanding data to inform policy. Indeed, ahead of the GAML meeting, we need to be advocating for a comprehensive and holistic framework—what I call “educational prosperity”— that acknowledges the importance of the foundations for successful learning. Our framework increasingly needs to embrace a life-course approach that considers the impacts of various processes from conception through late adolescence—and we need to be using these data to craft more effective policies.

Traditional approaches to measuring education progress have proven to be insufficient and are failing to capture a critical nuance: Looking at exam results for 15-year-olds—or even 10-year-olds— is misleading. Many of the existing frameworks have misled policymakers for decades because they ignore the cumulative result of a number of factors that affect children’s development. As researchers would put it, we’re using test results to make causal claims and while assessment is critical, it only captures the reality of a specific moment in time, rather than the cumulative and foundational factors that led up to it. Poor reading results in fourth grade, for example, are often the result of poor foundational support for literacy in the early years—and so may be an indication of misguided early childhood development policy or insufficient family support and not necessarily school policy, poor infrastructure, or low teaching quality.

An alternative approach through the education prosperity framework

The “educational prosperity” framework presented in the new UIS papers offers an important alternative that can use existing monitoring data to track the success of families, communities and public institutions in developing children’s cognitive skills, as well as their social, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being. The framework provides a multi-dimensional understanding of development at each stage that looks at the role of families, institutions and communities. These ‘Foundations for Success,’ which drive outcomes along six stages of development, provide an important visualization of the ways that success can be cumulative and non-linear.

For example, prosperity outcomes for children in early primary school may include literacy and numeracy, but success is not dependent on institutional factors such as quality instruction and adequate learning materials alone. Rather, the framework operates under the understanding that success is also built on family factors such as parenting skills and family involvement, as well as community factors such as adequate resources and social capital. The framework uses a wider lens for understanding student outcomes—recognizing the reality that school factors and inputs alone are not the sole foundations for student achievement.

Focus on early reading

The educational prosperity framework is based on three interconnected premises. The first is that early reading needs to be the primary focus of educational monitoring systems. The reason is simple: literacy is a pre-requisite for later success in lower and upper secondary levels and provides the scaffolding for developing so many other skills, including numeracy, problem solving and socio-emotional know-how. Indeed, a failure to develop strong skills during the early years increases the risk of school failure.

Second, to better capture ‘school effects’, we can build an informative educational monitoring systems which incorporate the findings of over twenty years of research on the causal factors that lead to better student outcomes.

Third, results from the international studies need to be coupled with national studies and small controlled experimental studies, which can provide educational administrators with information for setting achievable goals, allocating resources, and creating policies for change. We don’t need to keep gathering data on things we already know and instead, should focus on the small-scale testing of reform and studies that focus on a small number of factors. We need to be measuring these in greater detail while tracking them longitudinally.

To be clear, I am not calling for the abandonment of large-scale international studies. Much of my research is based on PISA data, which has played a critical role in helping countries understand how well their students compare with students in other countries while generating the political will for investing in education. But it’s time to look beyond the international studies and consider additional ways to measure and guide our educational policies.

As countries decide to join cross-national assessments or continue to develop their own, I am hopeful that the “educational prosperity” framework will be an essential guide for individual countries—and the global community as a whole—to craft effective strategies that promote educational opportunity for all children.

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New collaboration aims to make learning inclusive and accessible for all students

The Learning Bar and the Rick Hansen Foundation have teamed up to help educators assess the level of inclusivity and accessibility within their school environment. Through the collaboration, the OurSCHOOL Student Survey, developed by The Learning Bar, now includes questions of students’ awareness of the barriers facing peers with physical disabilities, and their willingness to take action. The data will enable educators to monitor the success of programs aimed at increasing awareness, accessibility and inclusion. Click here to find out more.

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Using student data to reduce anxiety and enhance school climate at St. Dominic Fine Arts School, Calgary, AB.

Implementing the OurSCHOOL Student Survey at St. Dominic in 2015 allowed former Principal Kevin DeForge and Assistant Principal Joelle Marshall to learn that 32 per cent of students reported feeling medium to high levels of anxiety at school. Knowing it’s not just the data that matters, but what you do with it, Kevin and his team sought to understand what was driving this.

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Are your students ready for life after graduation?

The critical process of career planning starts in early childhood and intensifies during adolescence. Despite the emphasis placed on identifying a vocation before graduation, less than 20 percent of students make a stable career choice by age 17.

Do you have the complete picture?

 

The new Career Pathways module was developed by our in-house research team to help educators better understand and support their Grades 7-12 students’ transition from school to higher education and employment. 

The module, a part of the OurSCHOOL Secondary Survey, consists of 10 main question areas which capture:

student aspirations after graduation;
level of commitment to a particular job;
current exploration into career options;
students’ career knowledge;
perceived obstacles;
current use of school-level resources and opportunities; and,
perceived importance of specific skills.
How can you use the data to prepare your students for success?

A Thematic Report outlines student goals, vocational knowledge and career identity. Make informed decisions on the support and instruction students need to explore careers, guide them to relevant programs, and gain the vocational experience they need to succeed.

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