Alberta’s new standardized school tests will emphasize competency over content

EDMONTON – The long-awaited replacement for Alberta’s controversial Provincial Achievement Tests could roll out in different grades and will evaluate students’ abilities more broadly, say education officials.

School districts could start trying out prototype tests as early as next year to replace the PATs.

“We’re certainly working toward that goal,” said Kim Capstick, press secretary for Alberta Education Minister Jeff Johnson. “I would say it’s still a work in progress but we’re getting to a final product.”

Students will still take PATs as usual this year, Johnson said.

“But we have been working on what alternatives could look like, because we don’t want to abandon standardized testing. We just want to modernize it,” Johnson said. “There is a vision developing.”

Every year, students across Alberta take the PATs in Grades 3, 6 and 9.

Now, government is developing a replacement provincial assessment model to gauge kids’ literacy and numeracy skills more broadly, across a variety of subject areas. That’s different than the PATs, which focus on student knowledge in specific subjects such as language arts, social studies and science.

The new testing emphasizes competency over content, Capstick said.

“The concept there is that students don’t necessarily need to just be able to regurgitate fact. They need to be able to apply it and understand how it would apply. That’s a real shift … and so that does change the way we assess.”

The PATs are created by Alberta teachers, align with Alberta’s curriculum and provide a provincewide snapshot to show if students are meeting provincial standards.

Advocates of the standardized tests say they provide valuable information for teachers, school districts and government policy-makers about students’ learning. Critics argue the tests don’t offer an accurate portrait of a year’s worth of learning, they create stress for students and produce results that are unfairly used to rank schools.

The province is “nearing the finish line” to figure out what will replace the PATs, Capstick said. Officials are deciding when the tests should be administered and the current grades tested could change, she said. The education minister has said government will replace the Grade 3 test first, Capstick said.

“It’s not necessarily going to be at Grade 3 and it’s certainly not going to look like the same kind of thing it looks like today,” Capstick said.

Alberta Education officials spoke about the new assessment model just over a week ago at a symposium in west Edmonton designed for educators working in curriculum development. Ron Eberts, assistant superintendent for learning services with Red Deer public school district, attended the symposium and was pleased to hear a replacement for PATs is on the horizon.

“Certainly, just talking about the transformation from a content-based to a competency-based test, I know we would be thrilled with that,” Eberts said. “I think it’s a better assessment about what a student can actually do, as opposed to remember.”

The Edmonton public school board voted in November 2011 to urge the province to replace Grade 3 PATs with more appropriate assessments.

Edmonton Catholic Schools supports the shift toward assessing literacy and numeracy, said spokeswoman Lori Nagy. The school district would eagerly participate in piloting the new tests, she added.

“We see revisions to the PATs as a positive step in terms of updating assessments so that they are reflective of 21st-century skills that we want our students to develop.”

Parents in Alberta want some kind of standardized test that measures how their kids are doing, said Brad Vonkeman, president of the Alberta School Councils’ Association.

“It does not necessarily have to be a PAT, but a parent wants information on how their child is performing,” Vonkeman said. “We did do some work on an assessment paper and that was one of the key messages parents were telling us – that it doesn’t matter if it’s a PAT, but we want to know our kids are being assessed against a certain standard. That was one of the concerns they had.”

With files from Sarah O’Donnell