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Quebec Helps Save Canada from Sliding Down in Global Math Ranks

Aug 22, 2017 | Featured

Yuri Bilinsky, New Pathway – Ukrainian News.

The quality of Canadian secondary school education has been debated for some time. There are many teachers, academics and parents who criticize it for putting too much emphasis on the competence-based methods and child-centricity rather than on the traditional knowledge-based methods and teacher-centricity. A characteristic example of a more enthusiastic opinion on the quality of Canadian secondary education appeared on bbc.com on August 4, titled “How Canada became an education superpower,” by Sean Coughlan, BBC’s education correspondent. This upbeat piece refers to the fact that, in the 2015 PISA (The Programme for International Student Assessment) rankings, Canada placed third in Reading, seventh in Science and tenth in Math globally.

But can these results be interpreted as unequivocally as Sean Coughlan put it, “Canada has climbed into the top tier of international rankings”? Not in the case of “the queen of all sciences” or “the language of the universe”, math.

In 2012 PISA rankings, Canada placed thirteenth. Hence, the progress, from the 13th spot to the 10th over three years. But this growth in rankings was not based on the progress of Canadian 15-yearolds in math. Quite the opposite, Canada’s mean score went down, from 518 in 2012 to 516 in 2015. A two-point decline may not be such a big deal, but it still does not leave any room for fanfare.

When one considers a longer term, cheering becomes the last thing coming to mind. Canada’s mean score in math has been declining quite steadily over 12 years (in 2006 and 2009 it was flat at 527 points, see the graph) and dropped by 16 points, from 532 in 2003 to 516 in 2015. Over the same period, the mean score for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), representing the majority of the strongest economies, dropped much less, by 10 points. This fact deserves more attention than Canada’s current high spot in the PISA math rankings. If this relatively strong downward trend in Canada’s math score is not reversed, the country may soon start sliding in the global rankings.

Math results in many Canadian provinces are painting an even more worrying picture. Over the same 12-year period, mean scores in Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia went down by 39, 38, 32, 31, 21, 19 and 18 points correspondingly. Such provinces as Newfoundland and Labrador, Manitoba and Saskatchewan had lower than the OECD average math scores in 2015. The only province, where the mean score grew over this period, was Quebec, up by 7 points to 544 points.

In some provinces, there have been disturbing changes in the structure of the student population when it comes to math results. In 2012, 21% of all 15-yearolds in Manitoba were innumerate (below Level 2 in PISA classification), while in Prince Edward Island this category almost reached 25%. In Manitoba, the share of this category practically doubled from 2003. On the other end of the spectrum, the share of high achievers (Levels 5 and 6) in Manitoba almost halved over this period, from 19% to 10%. In Ontario, the share of innumerate grew by 44% while the share of high achievers dropped by 17%.

On this background, how did Canada as a whole manage to make progress in the 2015 PISA math rankings as compared to the 2012 rankings? Apart from Quebec’s stellar performance, which supported the total Canadian score, it was due to the fact that our closest competitors showed significant deterioration in their results. For example, the Netherlands’ score dropped by 11 points over 2012-2015 and the country went down from the 10th place to the 11th. Finland’s score dropped by 8 points and the country slipped from the 12th spot to the 13th.

Dr. Robert Craigen, math professor with the University of Manitoba, explained to the NP-UN that six Canadian provinces, which performed only slightly higher or below the OECD average in the 2015 PISA math results, use the WNCP (Western and Northern Canadian Protocol) curriculum. He called it “a horrible curriculum, based on the ‘discovery math’ approach which has proven detrimental.” Well, judged by the results, not a big stretch. While Ontario’s curriculum could be described as ‘WNCP lite’, said Dr. Craigen, Quebec also had a ‘discovery’ curriculum back in 2000-2003 but when the math scores began to decline in the province, the curriculum was redesigned. And now the math curriculum in Quebec “is clearly articulated as teacher-centered rather than child-centered and has most of what conventional instruction would dictate.”

It could be noted that the child-centered approach and discovery- or competence-based methods are now among the buzz-words used in the reforming of the Ukrainian secondary education system. As the long-term trend in Canadian math scores in PISA studies shows, these methods should be taken very carefully by the Ukrainian educators, at least as applied to teaching math. And the Canadian public needs to wake up to the negative trends in our math results and not be lulled into complacency by cheerful reporting in the media.

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