The article below confirms exactly what I have been saying. Students are now showing up in college lacking basic writing,reading and math skills. If the leaders in our education system do not take heed of this problem we are going to have serious repercussion. This is quite bad for a first world country. It is time that the minister of education and the school boards stop the denial about education.
It is not about having special programs or white chalk boards. It is about teaching and being firm with parents. Parents need to allow teachers to do their jobs. Teachers in Ontario are not teaching grammar and time tables because some parents do not want it. This is rediculous,those parents should then home school their children.
Ontario Teacher's college also need to come clean and discuss the problems facing our teachers and the school system.
Growing number of Ontario college students need help in grade school math, study finds
May 19, 2012Comments on this story
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Thousands of first-year students at Ontario community colleges are taking catch-up courses in basic math skills — fractions, decimals, percentages — that they should have learned in grades 6, 7 and 8, according to an alarming new study.
The findings raise questions about the quality of math instruction in Ontario and reflect a broader public indifference to math that could be hampering economic growth and blocking students from lucrative careers, warn the authors of the College Mathematics Project, a joint study by York University and Seneca College of 35,000 students who take math in first-year college.
The report calls on Queen’s Park to consider a mandatory Grade 10 numeracy test like the Grade 10 literacy test, and even have student teachers write the test if they wish to teach math.
“We’re expressing concern that 8,300 students are taking preparatory and foundational math in first-year college, but the vast majority cover concepts introduced in grades 6, 7 and 8,” said co-author Graham Orpwood, professor emeritus of math at York University who has been involved with the seven-year study sponsored by the province.
A growing number of community colleges — including most in the GTA — offer catch-up courses for first-year students who are weak in math but need it for their field. Others offer broad first-year “foundation” programs such as pre-business and pre-technology that include math review.
When researchers looked to see which elements of grades 11 and 12 math these courses covered, they were startled to find concepts from back in grade school. Yet these college students have graduated from high school with at least three math credits.
How can that add up?
“Interesting question — but remember, you can get a credit with a mark of 50 per cent, and maybe these students are strong enough in areas such as geometry to balance out their weakness in arithmetic,” Orpwood suggested.
“To be fair, not all students in the foundation programs are weak in math, but the number of students who need the preparatory programs is growing and that’s a concern,” noted co-author Laurel Schollen, Seneca College’s associate vice-president academic, educational excellence.
Education Minister Laurel Broten was not available Friday to comment on the study, but noted Ontario’s Grade 8 students outperform the Canadian average in math, reading and science and Ontario students have seen scores climb in province-wide math tests.
Still, when the college study examined 19 pre-technology foundation programs and 11 in pre-business, it found every one reviewed the “order of operations” for algebra first taught in Grade 6 (the memory trick is BEDMAS do what’s in brackets first, then exponents, then division, multiplication, addition and subtraction).
Moreover, all pre-business courses reviewed fractions, 91 per cent covered decimals and 82 per cent covered percentages.
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