The Superintendent for the Seine River School Division says they still have a lot of work to do but math skills are improving in the division.

Seine River’s numeracy consultant, Matt Nikkel, gave trustees an update on the division's latest numeracy assessment results at last week’s board meeting. Mike Borgfjord says the mental math assessment is for grades one to eight and is conducted at the beginning of the school year to get an idea of where students are at.

Borgfjord says the assessment has indicated that as the curriculum becomes more challenging in the middle school years, they notice large gaps between students who are up to speed and those who are behind.

"we’re very fortunate that our teachers are really willing to look at the information, work together and identify certain areas of the curriculum where there is greater challenge and look at what types of things they need to do differently to work together to help work on closing those gaps," he adds.

Nikkel pointed out that Seine River does have a math recovery program but there are not a lot of staff who are trained in it. 

"This is the data, we're not going to sugar coat it," Nikkel said.

He notes the goal is for teachers to emphasize critical thinking in the classroom to help students solve abstract math problems. "We need some support and I think this data will help with that."

However, trustees were pleased to hear more and more students are taking higher level math in high school. Borgfjord says one of the contributing factors to that is some high schools in the division have turned the one-semester grade nine math course, which he indicates many students struggle with, into a full year course. He adds it is a worthwhile investment as more and more students are taking on applied and pre-calculus in grades ten to twelve.

"We don’t want our results in the higher level math by less kids taking those streams," says Borgfjord. "We’d rather see our results drop a little bit and have a lot more kids accessing the higher level mathematics, and all three programs are really good, but we’ve seen a tremendous growth in the last three years in the number of students taking pre-calculus and applied which is a real positive for us and we’ve seen our results continue to be pretty strong."

Borgfjord notes for a period of time, Seine River's grade 12 provincial math exam results, in pre-calculus and applied, were well below the provincial average but have since rebounded and now stand above the average.