A Windsor school has won a provincial math award.
The Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board is reporting St. Gabriel Catholic Elementary School was the only school this side of London and one of only 22 Ontario schools to be recognized by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) with the 2018 Bette M. Stephenson Recognition of Achievement Award. The award recognizes schools using EQAO data to develop learning strategies to support students in mathematics learning.
"The 2018 Dr. Bette M. Stephenson Recognition of Achievement is presented to schools that supported students’ positive attitudes toward math, which led to academic success," said EQAO officials. "Educators at these schools developed a number of strategies based on their analyses of EQAO data and other local information. The strategies they put in place were effective, as evidenced by EQAO results over the last three years."
The school board said early in the year, staff review EQAO data and consider three-year trends to help determine any areas that may need improvement. Staff then look at assessment questions that present a challenge and consider how they relate to the big ideas and concepts in the mathematics curriculum. Staff also consider teaching practices that can close the gaps in students’ mathematical understanding in their Grade 4 or 7 classroom. Teachers also look at data for students who demonstrated a drop from the provincial standard from Grade 3 to Grade 6, discuss possible reasons for the drop and monitor the implementation of strategies moving forward. Those strategies allowed students to rise to the provincial standard from Grade 3 to 6 and were responsible for an increase in students’ positive attitudes about math.