The province claims Alberta students are closing the learning gaps due to disruptions from lockdown during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, but a Calgary professor said the numbers may not be telling the whole story.

According to Provincial Achievement Test results published on Nov. 8, Grade 6 students performed better in science and social studies compared with the previous year in both the excellence and acceptable standards. Grade 9 students showed “significant improvement” for social studies and science in both the acceptable standard, as well as math and science in the excellence standard.

The province also said Grade 12 students also showed improvement in the majority of subjects in the acceptable and excellence standards on their diploma exams.

All these improvements show that students are “closing the gap” between pre-pandemic and pandemic test results caused by learning disruptions due to lockdown measures during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the province said.

“The 2023-24 diploma exams and Provincial Achievement Test results are a strong indicator that learning gaps caused by the pandemic are closing,” read a statement from Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides included in a Nov. 8 news release.

“We recognize there are opportunities for improvement, but I am confident that through our investments, proposed legislation amendments and enhanced assessments, our K-12 students will gain the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.”

But Sarah Hamilton, an assistant professor at Mount Royal University, said the numbers lack a fuller context. The province did not provide data for the 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 school years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which makes it difficult to interpret trends over time. Provincial testing was also impacted by the wildfire season in the 2022/2023 and 2023/2024 school years, further impacting scores.

Hamilton added that there aren’t Alberta-specific studies about learning disruptions and most of the knowledge around pandemic learning disruptions is coming from the United States or other parts of Canada.

“[The province] didn’t have a lot of data that was telling them a comparative analysis of what students had previously achieved versus what was happening during COVID,” Hamilton told LiveWire Calgary.

“When students came back, teachers were anecdotally reporting that, yes, there were definitely some things that they had to make up. None of that’s a surprise.”

Hamilton also noted that math and language arts scores have been omitted from the province’s reports, partly because of new curricula that were introduced during the 2023/2024 academic year/

“We can’t really attribute the any of the results in those subjects specifically to COVID, because we’re also dealing with changes in curriculum, and we know the math curriculum changed significantly in terms of some of the different concepts students were learning. So that’s not really a good comparison,” she said.

“I think what the government is sort of saying with these results is, ‘You know what? Yes, we know that COVID had impacted learning. We’re now back on the right track again.’ That’s what I took from it in terms of the actual results, but it was pretty vague in terms of … they didn’t give numbers, they didn’t talk about other subjects.”

The test results also do not highlight the access barriers some students faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hamilton added. Some students and their families relied on libraries and other public spaces for internet access to access online resources for their classes. Others didn’t have their parents at home to support them during lockdown.

“I think we have to keep in mind that learning looked different, not only from a big overarching like systematic standpoint, learning looked very different from one student to the next in each classroom because different students had different things available to them,” Hamilton said.

Province, school boards should not rely solely on test results

According to the province’s online guidelines on how to determine results, standardized testing is meant to complement day-to-day classroom assessment and only provides part of the overall picture of education performance in Alberta, a school authority or school. Some learning assessments can’t be accurately captured in a pen-and-pencil test, the province added.

Hamilton said the results do not look at the growth of a student and different factors that can affect test results, such as test anxiety or health issues. Teachers will know their students the best and they aren’t looking at standardized testing data to figure that out, she said.

“There are lots of different things that can impact test results, which is why, overall, our reporting in education is never based on one assessment. It’s a spectrum of different things that happen throughout the year, and you triangulate the data to give you the most accurate picture of that student learning,” she said.

“You might have a student that achieves a satisfactory result on that assessment … Maybe that student started the year a full grade behind, and so by them achieving that satisfactory their rate of growth and learning might have been significantly higher than anyone else in that classroom. That assessment doesn’t reflect that, though, because all it shows is what they did on that one piece. It doesn’t show where they started from.”

Hamilton raised concerns about how much time is being dedicated to administering standardized tests when they can be better used for teaching and developing relationships in the classroom. On average, it takes around 20 to 25 minutes to administer literacy and numeracy assessments to students in Grades 1 to 3.

“They take time away from learning for students and teaching for teachers, and without some really solid rationale beyond the accountability,” the assistant professor said.

“I do know there are a lot of parents out there who appreciate those results because they want to know sort of where their students are … But I think we really have to look at, is it a good balance of the amount of time it’s taking.”

Hamilton also questioned the province’s investments in classroom complexity. The province said in the Nov. 8 release that it invested $1.5 billion to address specialized programs for Alberta students, including $44 million to address classroom complexity. These complexities can also impact standardized test results, Hamilton said. The average wait time for a public psycho-education assessment is now more than a year, and many families cannot afford assessments at private clinics.

“What I would really like to hear from the government and from schools and school boards is where are the funds being distributed right now,” Hamilton said.