Wolf Creek Public Schools would like Alberta Education to reconsider changes to the math and sciences diploma exams and the mathematics and social studies provincial achievement tests.
Last school year, the provincial government cut longer-form written answers in the math and sciences diploma exams, which now only have multiple choice questions. A pilot project looking at having written answers on Grade 6 and 9 social studies and plans to look at having it for Grade 3, 6 and 9 math never moved forward — and they remain as multiple choice as well.
Alberta Education has said the choice was both a money-saving measure — with it saving the provincial government $1.6 million — and that there has been little impact to the overall marks of students.
But Larry Jacobs, superintendent of Wolf Creek Public Schools, said the division is concerned what the changes could mean to individual students.
Jacobs said the change could affect students in their diploma exams because some do not do as well on multiple choice as they do on the written portion. He said one of the things that has to be recognized is that there is not necessarily one right answer for a lot of things in the world.
“The difficulty with removing that portion is that we do a lot of our teaching nowadays to actually show students how to put together a logical argument, how to put together a series of steps to arrive at a solution or some kind of an analysis of a problem. That is critically important,” Jacobs said.
“We talk about 21st century learning skills and a large portion of that is dependent on creative solutions based on research and ways of thinking.”
The Wolf Creek Public Schools board has sent a letter to the Alberta Education Minister and sent copies to divisions around Central Alberta, with a copy appearing in the Red Deer Public School District agenda recently.
“Our worry is that when you pull that (longer-form written) portion out a couple of things happen,” Jacobs said.
“Certainly school systems would not focus as much on that because of the fact that they might not have ways to demonstrate it at the provincial level. So that is our biggest fear, that there is not that an encouragement at the provincial level to maintain what we consider to be those 21st Century learning skills.”
John Rymer, executive director of learner assessment with Alberta Education, said the department hasn’t had a lot of boards or parents contact them with concerns. He said the changes went smoothly and in terms of results nothing has changed. He said they weren’t getting more information out of the written-component than they do from the multiple choice section of the diploma exams.
Rymer said looking at pure math, there might have been 15 tasks on the old written component math exam and 12 of those could have been done a machine scored test.
“What we found was if you got that stuff right on the machine scored test then you’re still going to get it right on the written part because there was no difference in terms of the difficulty or the challenge of answering it,” Rymer said.
There has been a fiscal challenge in the province lately and without getting more information out of the written portion of the exam it made sense to save the $1.6 million it costs to mark that portion of it, according to Rymer.
There has been no talk by Alberta Education of moving the test back to the way it had been or having the longer-form written responses this school year. He said with the number of changes with the Inspiring Education dialogue and other changes to education in the province there could be a transformation of the exams in the future, with them focusing on competency based learning looking at literacy skills, critical thinking skills, problem solving, leadership skills and other areas.
sobrien@www.reddeeradvocate.com