The Alberta government recently introduced Bill 6, a proposed amendment to the Education Act, that it says will “prioritize literacy and numeracy and ensure the province’s youngest learners receive the help they need as early as possible.”
Large classes with students who have a range of learning needs, including tailored learning plans, are among the factors that can make it difficult for teachers to ensure each child’s needs are being met. Implementing early literacy and numeracy tests with the intent of early intervention for at risk learners has intuitive appeal.
If passed, Alberta’s Bill 6 legislation would mandate reading and math tests from kindergarten to Grade 3, effective by fall 2026. According to ministry officials, its goal is to identify learning gaps early using short, simple and non-graded activities.
The announcement has received swift and forceful reaction from academics, the Alberta Teachers’ Association and senior-level school administrators.
Their concerns relate to the validity and reliability of the tests, how they were developed and their instructional value. Critics also raise concerns over the lack of teacher consultation and involvement, additional time teachers will need to administer and score the tests and whether the test results will change teaching and learning practices.
Questions also remain about whether schools will need additional resources to address learning gaps identified by way of the tests, since the bill doesn’t include any mention of this. The $11 million dollar pricetag of Bill 6 may not reap the insights needed to identify and meaningfully intervene for young children at risk.
Why early literacy matters
The testing proposed in Bill 6 misses important dimensions of literacy development. Early reading proficiency depends largely on two skills: phonemic awareness (the awareness to notice and work with different sounds) and phonics (mapping sounds to letters).
These foundational concepts and skills are learned by the majority of young children by the end of Grade 2, including English language learners (ELL) and children disadvantaged by socio-economic status. Exposure to two languages may heighten ELLs’ keen perception of sounds, helping them to apply their knowledge of how letters and their sounds relate and different letter patterns to correctly pronounce written words.
A learning-to-read school book I had as a child, Friends and Neighbours, is still on my bookshelf. As a newly arrived immigrant to Canada at age four from Indonesia, I was relatively proficient in conversational English by Grade 2. I learned the process of reading, including how to sound out letters and their English language patterns, by drawing on the vocabulary I developed and by interacting with native English-speaking children in the neighbourhood, on the playground and in the classroom.
However, a child’s strengths in recognizing and working with the sounds that make up individual words — phonemic awareness and phonics — may provide a false sense of security. These strengths can mask the needs of children at risk of reading failure as they transition to Grade 4, when the focus shifts from learning to read to reading to learn. At this stage, vocabulary knowledge becomes critical.
Beginning in Grade 4, the litmus of reading success is a child’s ability to comprehend increasingly complex and academically demanding texts. The testing proposed in Bill 6 misses the important role of vocabulary knowledge in this process.
The fourth-grade slump
The well-documented “fourth-grade slump” refers to the drop in reading performance many students experience around Grade 4. Children must shift from learning to read to reading to learn — a shift that is dependent on vocabulary depth and breadth.
A seminal 2003 study from researchers Jeanne S. Chall and Vicki A. Jacobs underscored the crucial role of vocabulary knowledge in reading success in Grade 4. They found that disadvantaged learners in Grades 2 and 3 scored as well as peer learners from higher socio-economic backgrounds.
At this early stage of reading development, phonemic awareness and phonics provides an important foundation for learners. The researchers found that it is not until Grade 4 that scores decelerate for children from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
Without attention to vocabulary knowledge, young children may find themselves woefully under-prepared for the accelerating demands of Grade 4.
What Bill 6 overlooks
Given decades of research on reading development, Bill 6’s current focus is too narrow and offers only limited utility in early identification of young learners who will be at risk by Grade 4. Most children readily learn these skills already. The relative minority who struggle with these skills respond well to direct, explicit and intensive interventions.
To support students effectively, Alberta must measure vocabulary knowledge among young children. In addition, handwriting should also be assessed. Handwriting plays an enormous role in unlocking vocabulary in Grade 3, and as a skill, unfolds from kindergarten to Grade 3 years along a developmental continuum.
Devising tools to assess vocabulary and handwriting is more than a matter of short, simple and non-graded activities. More comprehensive assessments, such as studying samples of children’s writing on a familiar and engaging topic, would provide much more useful data for transforming classroom pedagogy and practice.
Such assessments would take more time to administer and score, but they would be a far better use of $11 million than narrow assessments that capture only the tip of the iceberg of what matters for long-term literacy success.
Hetty Roessingh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
