Saskatchewan students rank 7th in Canada for literacy

Brad Wall's Spring Budget should include a huge funding increase for education in order to try and remedy this shocking finding. Unfortunately, you only need to listen to the speeches of certain government MLA's to understand the problem.

The following article was written by James Wood and appeared in the January 4, 2011 Leader Post

Saskatchewan students trail many of their counterparts in other provinces in literacy levels, according to the recently released 2010 Education Indicators report from the provincial Ministry of Education.

But one piece of good news is that the province's students still have a strong showing at the international level.

The annual education indicators report is a broad-ranging compendium of various statistics and rankings, including achievement levels.

According to the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) cited in the report, which compiles data from across the country on 13-year-olds, Saskatchewan has the smallest proportion of high-performing students in reading in the country.

"Less than one in 10 Saskatchewan students achieved level three, whereas an average of over one in five students in Canada achieved this level. The proportion of students who performed adequately (at level two or level three) in Saskatchewan was two percentage points less than the Canadian average," according to the indicators report.

Saskatchewan ranked sixth among provinces in the proportion of students who performed adequately.

And with female students generally outperforming males, the report notes that Saskatchewan does have one of the lowest gender gaps even as the female students' average score was 16-per- cent higher than males in Saskatchewan.

The indicators report also cited the 2009 Programmene for International Student Assessment (PISA), an assessment of 15-year-olds worldwide conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Reading literacy was the major domain assessed, with mathemathics and scientific literacy were assessed as minor domains.

"Saskatchewan student results were significantly higher than the OECD average in all the subjects of this assessment. However, the Canadian average performance was significantly higher than Saskatchewan's performance in all subjects assessed," reads the indicators report.

In the reading assessment, Saskatchewan had 84.5 per cent of students reach what the PISA report defines as "baseline proficiency." That was below the Canadian average of 89.8 per cent but above the international average of 81.2 per cent.

Saskatchewan's proportion of high-performing students at 8.7 per cent was also lower than the Canadian average of 12.8 per cent but was higher than the OECD average of 7.6 per cent.

The province's report also shows that Saskatchewan has gone from having performances similar to Canada on the 2000 PISA report to posting performances "significantly below" the country since then.

Saskatchewan ranked seventh in the country in reading and scientific literacy and sixth in mathematics.

A government news release when the indicators report was made public said it "shows the need to bring student performance on national and international assessments to meet or exceed the Canadian average."

leaderpost.com