New testing aims to catch kids 'faking' their reading skills and actually get help

In kindergarten, Finley Hodge wasn't ready to read. He didn't learn in Grade 1, either. But this was before mandatory screening, so no one caught the problem. 

By Grade 2, his teacher was complaining about rambunctious behaviour in class. But the teacher missed the point.

"He was faking a lot of it and pretending he could read," said his mother, Andrée Hodge. 

"They [used to] let these children struggle till the end of third grade, and then say, 'OK, now we'll do something.' It's disastrous for those children.… It's the wait to fail, right?"

Finley's experience is one reason why Hodge and many literacy experts are celebrating a major new push to catch every child who struggles with reading in Calgary.

Over the last four years, the Calgary Board of Education (CBE) retrained 1,000 teachers to implement systematic screening in every single kindergarten classroom, at the beginning and end of the school term. This year, they'll screen all Grade 1 to Grade 3 children at the start of the year as well, ahead of new requirements coming in under the Alberta curriculum.

The tests are designed to break down the skill of reading and pre-reading into several component parts and hone in on exactly where each child struggles. Then teachers can catch those falling behind before they get lost.

It represents a new approach to reading education that experts hope will spare hundreds of children the misery of failure.

Finley, who graduated from high school last year, recalls his reading difficulties.

"My first memory of struggling … I remember being [sent to] the halls quite a bit, watching the class from the hall," said Finley. "I'm really happy that they're doing this."

In Finley's case, he was eventually diagnosed with dyslexia. He struggled to catch up to his peers, but with hard work, he graduated. He started machine technologies at SAIT last week.

His mother went on to co-found Decoding Dyslexia Alberta to help her and other parents find more help for their children.

Melody Pelling is the CBE's education director for early literacy. She said these tests in school aren't stressful. The children often don't even know they're being tested because in kindergarten, especially, pre-reading tests can be incorporated in classroom play.

At its most formal, a teacher might sit down one-on-one with a child.

"Students might be presented, orally, by their teacher, the sounds sss aaa ttt. And they would be asked to put those sounds together to make a word," she said.

"They would orally state back to the teacher 'sat.' That blending and segmenting would be two examples of those types of probes that we're doing that might indicate if they struggle, that they might be needing additional support."

The tests identify exactly what help each individual child needs. The data gets compiled at the school level, then district-wide. 

The public school board won't be ready to release data from the first years of testing until later this fall, but early indicators show it is working, Pelling said.

She says previously this kind of literacy work was left to individual teachers and schools.

"So we saw a lot of inequity between schools and between districts and, quite frankly, across Canada."

Krista Poole leads the CanLearn Society, which works with children who have had learning challenges. 

She says the problem was that research around literacy has changed substantially over the years, from a focus on whole word recognition to phonics and a systematic method of teaching. That means what teachers had learned in university was not necessarily up-to-date. She says it required a huge effort from teachers and the Calgary public district to retrain and standardize. But she thinks the effort is worth it.

"If we don't understand where children are struggling, instruction might be misaligned," she said.

Because not every child, of course, responds to the same instruction. Some need highly, highly supported instruction​​​​​.- Krista Poole

"Because not every child, of course, responds to the same instruction. Some need highly, highly supported instruction, even one-on-one intensive instructions for reading especially."

But with an increasing student population and tight budgets, Poole says the trick now is to ensure there is enough help to get those students the instruction they need.

In July, when Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides announced that more of this kind of screening would soon be required across the province, the Alberta Teachers' Association criticized the move saying students need more support, not more tests.

But they need both, said Pam Lougheed-Stack, literacy director with the Learning Disabilities Association of Alberta. CBC News reached out to her because she worked with Calgary Board of Education and several smaller school boards in Alberta to develop the screening tools.

As a former classroom teacher, she said she's had situations where there were too many kids and not enough support. She was able to identify exactly what a child needed and still wasn't able help them for lack of time and resources.

But the screening tools are an important first step. She said if teachers wait until the problems are obvious in Grade 3, "then we're trying to play catch-up and we've lost that critical window."