Just over half of St. Albert and Sturgeon County kids have the skills needed for school by the time they enter kindergarten, suggests a new report.
The Early Child Development Mapping Project released its final results for Alberta, Sturgeon County and St. Albert earlier this month. The province-wide project uses a standardized questionnaire to track the social competence, physical health, emotional maturity, language and communication skills of children as they enter kindergarten.
The first few years of a child’s life have great influence on his or her brain development, leading to long-term effects on their chances in school and life, said Susan Lynch, director of the project.
This study surveyed about 70,206 kindergarten-aged kids in Alberta between 2009 and 2013 to create a baseline for the state of Alberta’s students, Lynch said.
Preliminary results from the project last year suggested that about 80 per cent of Sturgeon County and 85 per cent of St. Albert kindergarten students were developing appropriately in all areas.
This year’s results, which include an additional 20,000 students, show that the number is closer to 54 per cent in the county and 61 in St. Albert.
This does not suggest a sudden drop in student skill, Lynch said. Instead, it reflects the addition of some 20,000 students to the study.
Both St. Albert and Sturgeon County kids are well above the provincial average of 46 per cent, the report suggests.
They are also less likely to be struggling in at least one area of development. Just 21 per cent of county kids and 18 per cent of St. Albert ones fall into that category, well below the provincial average of 29 per cent.
The big question now is why, Lynch said.
“St. Albert has a higher success rate … what is it that’s making a difference?”
Age, gender, economics and community resources are just some of the factors her team plans to examine, she said.
St. Albert Catholic school superintendent David Keohane suspects the difference is due to many factors, including the city’s high level of wealthy, educated parents.
“That’s a part of the reason why it is a blessing to be raised in St. Albert.”
The study found that about 31 per cent of Alberta students experience difficulty or great difficulty in the area of communications skills – the ability to know and speak about events in the world around them (compared to language skills, which cover concepts such as spelling and grammar). It concludes that this area is the greatest challenge facing Alberta’s students.
Catholic schools put a lot of emphasis on literacy in the first three years of school as a result, Keohane said.
“Literacy is the underpinning of everything in education,” he said – if you can’t read the words in a lesson, you can’t learn.
Lynch said her team will now start analyzing its results to figure out why some communities are more successful than others, leading to recommendations for improvement.
“In Alberta we’ve got a lot of children that are succeeding by the time they’re age five, but we’ve also got a big chunk that are not,” she said.
“We’ve got cause for celebration, and we’ve got work to do.”
The team hopes to do a second survey in two years to track changes in student readiness, Lynch said.
Student readiness maps
The Early Child Development Mapping Project is a province-wide program meant to track how ready Alberta's kids are for grade school at around age five. <br />Some 830 Sturgeon County and 1,258 St. Albert students were examined as part of the study. <br />Visit www.ecmap.ca for full results of the Early Child Development Mapping Project.
