Given that Ontario students rank among the very top in international testing, I greet this attention-grabbing headline with a great deal of scepticism. To me it has all the makings of a manufactured crisis. The article makes it clear that the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario is working with a revised definition of literacy. "The test was not measuring whether students can read or do arithmetic, but whether they can take written or numerical information and use it to solve problems." Here's the report: 74 page PDF. Here's what the students would need to be able to do to achieve what the headline calls "basic literacy" (p.26):
- "Evaluate posts in a discussion forum on health remedies by comparing the information they provide against that in a website from a well-known medical centre"
- "Determine which claims in a newspaper article about the benefits of sleep are supported by information and graphs in two long research articles"
Now let me be clear. I agree that students should be able to perform tasks at this level. Most people can't. Other jurisdictions score far worse than Ontario. And there is a big difference between this and what the headline describes as "basic literacy".
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