Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools will team up with a University of Alberta professor next month to help give students set back by COVID-19 a literacy boost.
Alberta Education Minister Adriana LaGrange announced March 12 that the province has launched a voluntary $100,000 program to have U of A educational psychology Prof. George Georgiou give teachers special training to spot and address reading deficits amongst early learners.
“We know COVID-19 is having an impact on student learning,” LaGrange said in a press release.
“The first step is to find out what the impacts are.”
Greater St. Albert Catholic deputy superintendent Rhonda Nixon confirmed March 24 that GSACRD would roll out this training at 13 K-9 schools this year and the next, starting with four this April to June.
St. Albert Public planned to have at least one school take part in this initiative, said curriculum services director Catherine Coyne.
COVID-19 hobbles literacy
Georgiou said he and his team looked at literacy levels in Grade 1 to 9 students in 25 schools in the Edmonton region last year using ongoing reading assessments. In September 2018 and 2019, about 30 per cent of these students were determined to be struggling readers who performed below their grade level – far above the five to 10 per cent you would typically expect to see. By September 2020, this had jumped to 40 per cent.
“If 40 per cent of our people now struggle (with reading), that will have a significant impact on the future of society,” Georgiou said.
“We need to provide them with instruction right away. The longer we wait, the worse the problem becomes.”
Georgiou said several factors could be behind this post-pandemic jump in struggling readers. Teachers were caught off-guard when the province shut down schools last March at the start of the pandemic, which resulted in lost instructional time as they scrambled to adapt to online learning. Struggling readers would have had less one-on-one time with teachers while learning online, and may have received less benefit from online lessons compared to in-person ones.
Georgiou said his team found fast, targeted interventions could help schools counteract these drops in literacy. Fort Vermilion teachers assessed their students for literacy difficulties last September, for example, and were able to bring about 80 per cent of their struggling readers up to par with some five months of focused instruction.
But teachers won’t know to give that help unless they know a student is struggling, Georgiou said. This Alberta Education program would see his team show teachers how to administer two short literacy assessment tests they could use to identify struggling readers. Alberta Education would cover the costs of any substitute teachers during these tests.
Georgiou said he hopes to start working with schools through this program this April, and that all Alberta schools would take part in it.
Nixon said GSACRD parents would get more information on this literacy program through an upcoming letter.
Parallel study
Nixon said the board had coincidentally already partnered with Georgiou on another literacy-related study when the province announced this latest initiative.
That study is part of a five-year federally funded project that involves schools in Alberta, Greece and the Netherlands, Georgiou explained. Its goal is to figure out how students became fluent readers and what cultural/instructional factors affected fluency.
Georgiou said the GSACRD part of this study will see about 50 Grade 2 and 5 student volunteers at three schools take half-hour reading tests this spring and the next.
When people see an unfamiliar word, they have to try and sound it out a few times before they learn to do so automatically, Georgiou explained.
By having students read sentences containing nonsense words and tracking their eye movements with a camera, Georgiou and his team hope to find out how many times students had to “read” an unfamiliar word before its pronunciation stuck in their heads – information scholars could use to create more effective literacy lessons. They predicted that students would need about four reads to “learn” these new words, with struggling readers requiring more attempts. Older students would need fewer reads than younger ones.
Nixon said parents would soon get letters home asking if they want their kids to take part in this study. Georgiou said he and his team hope to have initial results from this study by next January.
Georgiou said parents can best support student literacy by reading to their kids every day for at least 20 minutes. It also helps if the kids read to their parents so the parents could explain definitions and correct pronunciation.
Anyone with questions on the provincial project and the U of A study should go to Nixon at 780-459-7711.
