Dairn Alexandre (a pseudonym) is a regular BILD guest blogger; for more information about Dairn, and to read his earlier posts, click here. Dairn has taught in Quebec and now works as a teacher in Alberta, where he lives with his wife, two kids, and dog.
Alberta is in the midst of an educational crisis.
When the media brought to light the province’s underwhelming provincial achievement test (PAT) results a few years back, the public were suddenly very aware of an unsettling new reality for Alberta’s education system: Students are straining to meet the grade-level expectations outlined by the provincial government. From manipulating the cut scores on the PATs to reporting on pools of Knowledge and Employability (K&E) students separately from their peers, this problem is likely worse than the public is aware of, since there are a number of issues with how Alberta Education is reporting its yearly PAT data to parents, teachers, and the public alike. Despite these tactics, recent reports are indicating that achievement scores across the board have declined even further over the past few pandemic years. And while these exams should not be considered the sole metric for measuring the successes and failures of our schools, they do provide some concrete data that points to potential underlying problems within the educational system.
The released PAT data linked above suggests that Alberta students are struggling to write well. This is not surprising. One would only have to examine the exemplars for the Grade 9 English Language Arts PATs to see that the standards are exceptionally low in writing. And even when considering these absurdly low standards – especially on the mandatory functional letter-writing component of the PAT that was required until last year’s exam – there are still a fair number of students who are unable to meet this very basic level of writing. My experience as a PAT marker affirms that students that do meet the basic standard oftentimes resort to simple knowledge-telling within the classroom environment and on these provincial exams because they lack the necessary skills and processes in writing, unable to produce text that is knowledge-transforming or knowledge-crafting – both of which are comparatively higher-level means of building content understanding (Galbraith, 2009; Herbert, 2019; Kellogg, 2008). What this means is that students are simply regurgitating information that they are being prompted with, instead of exploring meaningful and insightful connections to other texts, to themselves, and to the world at large.
As these students enter high school, this lower quality of writing puts them at a significant disadvantage over their peers from other jurisdictions, since they are incapable of producing high-quality academic texts on their own. One reason for this deficit may be that Alberta teachers are only devoting time to authentic, high-interest, and challenging inquiry-based writing tasks. And while these sorts of tasks are pedagogically sound (Boscolo & Gelati, 2019), they neglect to address strategy instruction within their classrooms as well. Strategy instruction needs to be explicitly taught by teachers, making it clear to students how they learn, remember, and use the information that they acquire in class. When they are taught specific strategies to boost their cognitive and metacognitive capacities, these young learners will be able to improve their potential to learn the content being presented in class. Therefore, if teachers were to dedicate more time to strategy instruction in writing – through modeling the writing processes involved for students, scaffolding them as they take on more responsibility monitoring the application of the strategies until they can eventually take over these processes themselves, and practicing these strategies until they become internalized (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987; Ferretti & William, as cited in Graham et al, 2019[A1] ) – the hope is that students will become more proficient writers (McKeown & FitzPatrick, 2019). Some research studies (Wilson, 2019; McKeown & FitzPatrick, 2019) demonstrate that this approach is statistically one of the most powerful and effective approaches to teaching writing that teachers should be utilizing in their classrooms. “This means teachers who provide direct, explicit instruction in strategies for writing can generally expect positive results, and if self-regulation strategies are integrated, those results should increase further” (McKeown & FitzPatrick, 2019, p. 263). Through the use of think-alouds, mnemonics, and scaffolding – and by explicitly modelling specific writing strategies such as those used for generating ideas for writing, organizing texts, and setting specific goals in writing – the hope is that students will eventually be able to continue these strategies independently (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987; McKeown & FitzPatrick, 2019). From the initial stages of planning to the recursive stages of evaluating and revising, implementing these explicit strategies will eventually allow students to internalize and operationalize these processes, and, ultimately, become more proficient writers in various genres (McKeown & FitzPatrick, 2019).
Further compounding the problem of teaching discourse knowledge is the lack of professional development opportunities for preservice and seasoned teachers to be trained to implement this approach properly. Because so many of these teachers seem ill-equipped to teach writing competently due to a lack of training courses available, the solution that needs to be proposed must not only be viable, but also easily accessible for all teachers on staff. This is why a self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) approach to writing instruction is proposed here, since it might be useful in supporting students’ writing development in a more systematic and structured way. The SRSD model combines explicitly teaching students strategies they will need for learning how to brainstorm, plan, compose, reorganize, evaluate, and revise written work effectively while also supporting them with their self-regulation and motivation (Santangelo et al., 2008). Overall, SRSD instruction is not only a relatively straightforward and accessible approach to teaching writing – meaning that it has a higher likelihood of being successful in most Alberta schools – it also capably resolves the issues related to building students’ discourse knowledge (Ferretti & Lewis, as cited in Graham et al, 2019).
Additionally, SRSD instruction – and writing in general – has the added benefit of improving one’s reading comprehension and fluency as well (Graham & Harris, 2019; Shanahan, 2019). “[I]nstruction that improves writing skills and processes improves reading skills and processes [and vice versa.] (Graham & Harris, 2019, p. 7)” Therefore, writing about previously read material, for example, allows students to record, analyze, connect, personalize, and manipulate key ideas from text, making it more memorable and easier for them to understand – particularly if they are academically weaker (Graham & Harris, 2019; Shanahan, 2019). If writing does, in fact, improve reading skills and processes, then this should have major implications for other subject areas as well.
Looking back at the statistics referred to at the beginning of this entry, it is rightfully assumed that a good portion of students who fell below the acceptable standard on the Grade 6 and 9 Math PATs, for example, likely had some gaps in their understanding of the subject itself. However, it must also be noted that many of these exams require students to read lengthy and lexically dense texts, interpret graphs, tables, diagrams, and statistical data, and decipher word problems involving visual and spatial elements. Therefore, these exams not only emphasize the application of these students’ computational skills and problem-solving abilities, but also the comprehension of various complex forms of written and visual information. In other words, these are primarily mathematical reading comprehension exams, not merely tests in mathematical operations alone. Not all these students have issues with reading, mind you. Some likely have legitimate deficiencies that are completely isolated to mathematical reasoning. But because much of the math curriculum is embedded in “real-world problems”, reading skills and processes play a vital role in how students engage with word problems and are, ultimately, tied in with how they are assessed. Even if we disregard the sheer amount of reading involved on the Grade 6 and 9 Math PATs, one of the most effective approaches to teaching – regardless of subject matter – is through writing to learn.
Ultimately, teachers can actively improve the learning outcomes of the children left in their care by implementing SRSD instruction in conjunction with building students’ content knowledge. This will allow students to not only make significant gains in their abilities to write texts in different genres, but also to make improvements in reading comprehension and fluency. Because of these gains in reading, SRSD instruction will also help with decoding, interpreting, and solving lexically dense word problems in math that involve more difficult semiotic information (Klein et al, as cited in Graham et al, 2019). While strategy instruction is not offered here as a “quick fix” to all of Alberta Education’s province-wide woes, it is a comprehensive approach to writing instruction that is well within the ability level of most educators and can be easily applied to various subjects once teachers are properly trained to implement it effectively in their classrooms. In the long run, this should not only help to promote better results on the yearly PATs, but more importantly the academic successes for students that their parents, teachers, and government hope for. And, in the end, isn’t that what really matters for Albertans?
References
Alberta Education. (2019a). Provincial achievement test multiyear reports (Report Version 1.0). Retrieved from https://www.alberta.ca/assets/documents/ed-pat-multiyear-province-report-table.pdf
Alberta Education. (2019b). Grade 9 examples of the standards for students’ writing: Functional writing. Retrieved from https://www.alberta.ca/assets/documents/ed-04-ela9-eosw-functional-2019.pdf
Alberta Education. (2022). Provincial achievement test multiyear reports. Retrieved from https://www.alberta.ca/assets/documents/ed-pat-multiyear-province-report-table.pdf
Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (1987). The psychology of written composition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Bishop’s University. (2020, June 01). Undergraduate courses & programs. Retrieved August 13, 2020, from https://www.ubishops.ca/academic-programs/school-of-education/undergraduate-courses-programs/
Boscolo, P., & Gelati, C. (2019) Motivating writers. In Graham, S., MacArthur, C. A., & Fitzgerald, J. (Eds.), Best practices in writing instruction (pp. 51-78). New York: Guilford Press.
Ferguson, E. (2018, October 24). ‘Shockingly low numbers’: Province dropped pass score to 42% for Grade 9 math test. Retrieved August 11, 2020, from https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/shockingly-low-numbers-even-with-the-bar-set-low-40-of-grade-9-students-fail-math-in-cbe
Ferguson, E. (2019, October 02). Public and separate school students show improvements in math test results. Retrieved August 12, 2020, from https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/public-and-separate-school-students-show-improvements-in-math-test-results
Ferguson, E. (2023, January 22). Standardized test scores drop provincewide since COVID. https://calgaryherald.com/. Retrieved May 1, 2023, from https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/standardized-test-scores-drop-alberta-covid
Friedrich, L. (2019) Setting up the writing classroom. In Graham, S., MacArthur, C. A., & Fitzgerald, J. (Eds.), Best practices in writing instruction (pp. 31-50). New York: Guilford Press.
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Graham, S., MacArthur, C. A., & Fitzgerald, J. (2019). Best practices in writing instruction. New York: Guilford Press.
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Klein, P. D., Haug, K. N., & Bildfell, A. (2019) Writing to learn. In Graham, S., MacArthur, C. A., & Fitzgerald, J. (Eds.), Best practices in writing instruction (pp. 51-78). New York: Guilford Press.
MacArthur, C. (2019) Evaluation and revision. In Graham, S., MacArthur, C. A., & Fitzgerald, J. (Eds.), Best practices in writing instruction (pp. 287-308). New York: Guilford Press.
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McKeown, D., & FitzPatrick, E. (2019) Planning. In Graham, S., MacArthur, C. A., & Fitzgerald, J. (Eds.), Best practices in writing instruction (pp. 261-286). New York: Guilford Press.
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