NORTHEAST — An evaluation given to Kindergarten students is showing that this year’s batch of students are less ready for Grade 1 than usual.
The EYE-TA measures a student’s cognitive skills, motor skills, communication skills, social skills and self-awareness.
Usually, the percentage of scores at the appropriate development level is around 90 per cent at the end of a school year. This year, it was 83 per cent. When the evaluation was given at the start of this year, it was 75 per cent.
“It looks like we’ve got lots of growth in this year’s Kindergarten group but they might be less ready to learn in Grade 1 than we’ve had in previous years,” said Don Rempel, the division's director of education, after the June 16 school board meeting.
Rempel said this data allows teachers to prepare so they can get the students to the expected grade level by the end of Grade 3. Luke Perkins, the division's chair, added later that schools are able to look at the data and compare among themselves.
“You can see the ones that are doing really good and they can share best practises with the other teachers,” Perkins said. “The nice thing about this data is you can pinpoint that.”
The chair said the data allows the division to act right away rather than five years later.
One theory given as to why the scores were lower this year was because there were more staff changes than usual.
“We are pushing hard to keep the same Kindergarten teacher every year, same Grade 1 teacher every year as much as we can because it’s really difficult to build capacity if we move those people around and have a different Kindergarten teacher every year,” Rempel said.
