Peggy Revell
The Rainy River District School Board is reporting a growing success rate when it comes to students passing the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test.
The OSSLT is written by Grade 10 students across the province to assess the reading and writing skills they’re expected to have acquired by the end of Grade 9.
Unlike other provincial testing overseen by the Education Quality and Accountability Office, students merely are evaluated as either being “successful” or “unsuccessful.”
Overall, 264 district students wrote the OSSLT in 2009 and 84 percent passed—up from 80 percent in 2004.
The provincial success rate was 85 percent.
“Students in the academic program continue to show a strong success rate, with 99 percent of our students successful in the test,” Beth Fairfield, the board’s secondary curriculum co-ordinator, told trustees at Tuesday night’s meeting here.
“This is the seventh-consecutive year that results have been above 90 percent for this group,” she noted.
Meanwhile, the success rate for students enrolled in an Applied English course increased by 13 percent—from 56 percent in 2004 to 69 percent this year.
The provincial success rate for this course is 62 percent.
Fairfield reported the success rate for boys has increased from 78 percent in 2004 to 81 percent in 2009 (the provincial success rate for boys is 82 percent).
Similarly, the success rate for girls has increased from 82 percent in 2004 to 87 percent this year—just below the provincial success rate of 88 percent).
The board’s success rate for students with special needs was 54 percent in 2009, an increase of two percent from 2004.
The provincial success rate for students with special needs is 55 percent.
“So, overall, in these areas where data is given to us . . . our students [are] at a rate comparable to the province, which is great news,” Fairfield enthused.
The local public board also has continued to see a decrease in the number of students deferring the test.
This year’s deferral rate was five percent, in comparison to a rate of 10 percent back in 2004.
The provincial deferral rate is four percent.
“There can be a variety of different reasons for a deferral,” Fairfield noted.
“But the bottom line is we want our students to be successful, but at the same time we want to make sure they’re ready to write the test before we have them write it,” she added.
Some reasons for deferring the literacy test could be because students may be in a program that hasn’t yet gotten them ready to meet the expectations of the Grade 9 curriculum that is tested by the OSSLT, there could be gaps in their education, or they could be English language learners.
“A small number of students could affect that percentage considerably,” noted board chair Dan Belluz, pointing to how, in a smaller board, the statistics sometimes can be misleading.
He added staff should be congratulated for the considerable drop in deferrals.
“We are working to get a greater participation rate and have more students be tested, to write it if they are ready,” Fairfield stressed, noting students are required to have written the test in order to take an Ontario Secondary School Literacy Course, which is a graduation requirement.
And with the release of the OSSLT data, the local board also has been given recommendations for improvements with the testing.
“If we look at our board profile, it indicates that our students show similar success to their provincial counterparts, in the reading section of the test, however, there continues to be room for improvement on the writing tasks,” noted Fairfield.
These recommendations include continued offering of programs that target the remediation of essential literacy skills for students identified as at-risk in literacy as a transition into high school and expansion of supports for students requiring and using assistive technology into the high school.
The district results for the other provincial testing is set to be released Sept. 17 by the EQAO.
