Most Grade 10 students won’t write planned provincial assessment tests this year

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This article was published 25/10/2023 (689 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Final-year students will resume annual provincial tests in the new year, but most of Manitoba’s Grade 10 pupils will get a free pass and forgo writing new standardized assessments in 2023-24.

At the start of the school year, the Education Department announced it would begin testing all 10th graders this fall as part of Manitoba’s updated assessment program.

The “full-census implementation” was scrapped last week in response to concerns raised by teachers and school leaders suggesting the rollout was disorganized and being rushed.

“It was just too much at the beginning of the year without enough time, basically. That was the No. 1 problem with the original plan: lack of time, lack of training, lack of details,” said Nathan Martindale, president of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society.

Manitoba Education is now seeking high school teachers to volunteer in an optional pilot program scheduled for the week of Nov. 20, and to help with centralized marking once the tests are submitted.

The guinea pigs — a group of teenagers taking language and mathematics courses this term — will complete the trial exams seeking to gauge their understanding of the curriculum by the end of Grade 9. The province has asked tests be held during regular class time.

It only makes sense to work out kinks before mass distribution, Martindale said, noting he’s received countless calls from members who were caught off guard by the initial plans and are worried about the workload associated with them.

While the union is fundamentally opposed to standardized testing — in part, because it challenges a teacher’s professional autonomy — he said teachers will support a phased-in approach, as long as there is a “genuine feedback loop” built into it.

In a statement Tuesday, Education Minister Nello Altomare said his office will review teacher input to inform decision-making.

For now, Altomare said the province believes a voluntary approach “will allow for authentic and meaningful assessments by teachers and help guide their lesson planning and practice.”

The former PC government pledged to adopt new curriculum-based summative tests in early years, middle years and Grade 10, in response to the K-12 commission’s 2020 recommendations.

The Progressive Conservatives later announced the revival of Grade 12 (40S) tests that were put on hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The end-of-term exams are anticipated to restart in January and be weighted 20 per cent of a Grade 12 student’s final mark in language arts and mathematics courses.

(These tests were previously worth 30 per cent, with the exception of essential mathematics results accounting for 20 per cent of a pupil’s overall subject grade.)

Manitoba’s francophone school division and Pembina Trails have signalled their interest in participating in next month’s pilot. A single mathematics teacher from St. James Assiniboia had volunteered to take part, as of Tuesday.

“We’ve always been in favour of evaluation, but we always tell our parents it’s like a snapshot — it’s a picture at a certain moment in time and the exams from the (Education Department) are made to see if we are parallel to the curriculum and doing the work we should be doing with our students and where we’re at,” said Alain Laberge, superintendent of the Division scolaire franco-manitobaine.

Louis Riel administration advertised the opportunity to staff members, but no one has signed up to date.

Seven Oaks and Winnipeg — the latter of which is the largest of its kind, with approximately 2,100 students enrolled in Grade 10 — are opting out entirely.

Superintendent Matt Henderson said he is not against “doing oil dips to see how effective our division is,” as long as provincewide exams are not high-stakes and the results are used to help teachers improve their practices to better support students.

“For this particular case, the process was rushed and I don’t think there was a lot of confidence in the model,” Henderson said.

“And at the end of the day, the implementation was going to stress out kids, teachers and principals.”

The province plans to collect a minimum 10 per cent sampling of tests from urban, rural and northern Grade 10 students across all programs.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca