Mike W. Bryant
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Apr 12/02) - A third round of nation-wide student mathematics skills assessments confirms the NWT still consistently lags behind the rest of the country.

The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada made public last week the results from 2001 School Achievement Indicators Program mathematics testing, written by some 41,000 students, 13- and 16-years-old, across the country in April and May.

NWT students finished second from last for both age groups. Only Nunavut fared worse.

By contrast, Alberta, which uses the same curriculum as the NWT -- the Western Canadian Protocol for Curriculum Development -- leads the way among other Canadian jurisdictions.

"This is really the first time we've had some baseline data for the new territory," said Dan Daniels, director of policy and planning for Education, Culture, and Employment, referring to Nunavut's split from the NWT in 1999.

"I think what we need to do is not only talk to jurisdictions that have patterns similar to us, but those jurisdictions that did better than us."

Daniels said language barriers, particularly in smaller, mainly aboriginal communities, are likely one reason why NET students have more difficulty with the tests.

The SAIP tests have been conducted nation-wide in math, reading and writing, and science since 1993, but not all in the same year.

The math tests were divided into two categories: mathematics content, and problem solving. The threshold for 13-year-olds is level two, or having the ability to solve equations using tables, diagrams, and finding solutions to one-step problems using rational numbers.

Students, at 16, should be able to perform at level three: Solving a variety of geometric equations, and find a solution to multi-step problems using a limited range of rational numbers.

The overall percentage of 13-year-old Canadian students reaching level two in mathematics content is 64.4, and 67.6 for problem solving. For the NET, the numbers are much lower: 40.5 and 32.9 respectively.

The percentage of 16-year-olds in the NET passing at level three are 35.9 for mathematics content, and 20.0 for problem solving. The Canadian average is 49.7 and 47.1 per cent respectively. More than 1,300 NWT students wrote last year's math skills assessment.

ECE minister Jake Ootes was not available for comment, but his predecessor, Frame Lake MLA Charles Dent, who was minister during the 1997 assessment, said he hopes the minister is paying attention to the test scores.

"That troubles me," said Dent, when he found out NET 16-year-olds fared worse in math content than they did in 1997. "I definitely have something to push with the minister."

"Those days (1997, before territorial division) were a lot tougher when we were cutting problems, not adding to them."