Page 22 - ECCS 2018-19 AERR & 3 Year Education

East Central Catholic Schools Challenges
ECCS Three-Year Education Plan and Annual Education Results Report
SOH Online Student enrolment increased by 9.0%
SOH decreased the disparity between school awarded and provincial awarded mark by 5%
Virtual & Home School Education Programs (Continued)
Over the last five years, the Division has implemented a series of changes to align instructional and assessment practices to reflect current pedagogical and technological practices that best support the various alternative delivery models. This began with measures such as creating a school council, organization rebranding and revisiting program publications. The next steps were improving hiring practices and the implementation of regional learning centers throughout the province. This was followed more recently by focused professional development and course mapping to ensure adequate and varied formative and summative opportunities were present in our courses.
Our most current initiatives include documenting attending to learning and student/teacher interaction in our Division’s student information system, and implementing a new learning management system (Canvas). Although implementation gaps are expected, we have started to see some positive numbers. Our online learning population has grown by 9% ↑, and there has been an overall reduction of 5% in the disparity between school awarded marks and diploma results in the June 2019 exams. We have also initiated a professional learning community (PLC) to research and identify additional strategies to reduce the gap between standardized assessments and school awarded marks.
The provincial assessment metrics remain a challenge in light of what the unique learning community defines as measurements of success. Parents have traditionally not been very supportive of their students writing provincial standardized assessments, which has a significant impact on the measurement metrics within the Division. The SOH administration and staff are researching and exploring various instructional and communication strategies to inform parents and prepare students to participate in provincial assessments such as utilizing PAT exams as part of course mark, and linking grade 12 student input of DIP writing anxiety due to lack of experience with formalized testing situations that writing PAT exams could help with.
Page 19