School-by-School Results for Ontario Literacy Test Now Available: Local
Student-Achievement Information Drives Purposeful Improvement

TORONTO, June 16 /CNW/ - Today the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) released school- and board-level results from the 2009-2010 Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT). With the results now available on EQAO's Web site, school communities across the province can access their local information and view the outcomes of their collective effort to improve student literacy.

On June 9, EQAO announced that of the students who wrote the test for the first time, 84% were successful, maintaining the high rate of success seen over the past few years. While these achievement results are good news for a majority of Grade 10 students, they also mean that 16% of students were unsuccessful and require ongoing support.

EQAO provides school communities with the results for students who were eligible to write the OSSLT for the first time this year and also for the students who had previously been unsuccessful on the test, absent for a past administration or deemed not ready to write the test until this year. These local results help secondary schools track the literacy development of all their students.

"At EQAO, we believe in the power of good information," said Brian Desbiens, the Chair of EQAO's Board of Directors. "That is why our agency is proud to report the results of its assessments publicly each year and why we work so hard to help education professionals, parents and the public understand how to interpret and use the data to support learning."

During the week of June 21, students who took the 2010 OSSLT will receive their results. Their individual report includes information about their areas of strength and weakness on the literacy test.

"Focused and deliberate improvement planning, fuelled in part by EQAO data, is taking place in school boards, schools and homes across the province," said Marguerite Jackson, EQAO's Chief Executive Officer. "The results remind us that it's never too late to focus attention on developing critical literacy skills and helping all students gain the basic tools they'll need for a successful future."

EQAO's comprehensive provincial report detailing the OSSLT results will be published on September 15 as part of a new secondary-school report. The new report will also include the results of EQAO's Grade 9 mathematics assessment.

All of the results released today are available on EQAO's Web site, www.eqao.com.

    
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BACKGROUNDER

About EQAO

The Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) came into being in 1996 as an independent arm's-length agency of the Ontario government after the Royal Commission on Learning recommended the establishment of province-wide testing to evaluate and report on the quality of education in Ontario schools. For more than a decade, EQAO's assessment practices and processes have placed the organization at the forefront of large-scale assessment programs worldwide. EQAO administers several province-wide tests each year. Results from these assessments yield individual, school, school board and provincial data on student achievement.

Assessments in Context

The quality of schools should not be judged according to EQAO data alone. EQAO results provide a "snapshot" of how students are achieving at one point in time and do not fully represent the richness and depth of multi-faceted schools and their students. Every school's staff has access to many sources of data in addition to EQAO reports. School staff and parents need to take into account the complexities of their school by examining their EQAO results along with all of the other information they have about student achievement, such as that found in or through report cards, classroom assessments and board assessments.

School and Board Information

EQAO provides reports to help school staff use local data and share it with their communities. These reports, available on EQAO's Web site, include

    
    -   ready-to-use summaries of results;
    -   easy-to-read graphs;
    -   information about the local context and
    -   trends over time.
    

For further information: and to arrange interviews, please contact Katia Collette, Communications Officer, [phone], [email protected]