Some mistakes are too important to ignore

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]  

There are mistakes in Geoff Johnson’s article “FSA not a good way of assessing Indigenous students” in the Times Colonist posted on October 29^th that deserve correction for several reasons. One is that the Times Colonist is widely read. The other is that the designation of “former superintendent” adds authority to the errors he has made.  

As noted in his article, “the Foundations Skills Assessment is administered to all Grade 4 and Grade 7 students, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.” The mistakes arise from his claim that the Foundation Skills Assessment is not a good way of assessing Indigenous students. One of them is the logical fallacy in his statement. He writes, “turns out that the four ‘lowest performing’ elementary schools on the FSA, according to the Fraser Institute’s one-shot ranking system, have significant populations of First Nations students.”  

In making that statement Johnson is committing the logical fallacy “after this, therefore because of this.” The logical fallacy occurs when someone assumes that because one event or set of conditions preceded another, the first event must have caused the second. In saying that the lowest performing elementary schools have significant populations of First Nations students, he is implying that the poor performance is attributable to the student composition of those schools.  

Another mistake deserving correction is drawing the connection between the performance of those schools and the assertion that “assessing a child in a way that does not seem meaningful or relevant to their life and culture is inauthentic and therefore meaningless, because it does not respect the learning of the whole child.” Indigenous children live in a society in which and literacy in the dominant language and numeracy figure prominently and where both have been used to deny Indigenous peoples their rights. Knowing how well Indigenous students perform on such assessments is essential to ensuring that they are being educated to the same standard as their non-Indigenous peers and from equipping them with the knowledge they need to defend their rights.  

I agree with Johnson that ensuring that the measures used to assess Indigenous youngsters are fair is essential. Johnson strongly asserts that “a central problem with the lack of validity of the FSA, as far as Indigenous students are concerned, is that the tests often contain items expressed in a way not obvious to an Indigenous student who might have a worldview and experiences that differ from the dominant Western culture.”  

This is something about which evidence can be brought to bear. Differential Item Functioning (DIF) is a technique used in assessment to determine if a question is fair to different groups of people. Imagine, for example, a math assessment, and you find out that for some reason, boys are more likely to get Question 5 right than girls, even when both groups are equally good at math. If that's the case, then Question 5 has "differential item functioning." Question 5 is not measuring math skills equally for boys and girls. DIF helps us figure out if a particular question on a test is easier or harder for one group of people compared to another, helping to ensure that tests are fair and unbiased.  

Before strongly asserting that the FSA is inappropriate for Indigenous students, one should consider the evidence. Johnson’s reference to the 2013 article by Jane P. Preston and Tim R. Claypool and the invocation of the imprimatur of The Canadian Council on Learning does not substitute for evidence about the Foundation Skills Assessment.  

Johnson quotes a B.C. government media release saying, “the redesign of curriculum maintains a focus on sound foundations of literacy and numeracy while supporting the development of citizens who are capable thinkers and communicators, and who are personally and socially competent in all areas of their lives.” He follows the quotation with the claim that the government statement ignores research about Indigenous ways of learning and is “dangerously close to being as colonial as you can get.”  

Could it not be argued that Johnson’s assertion is colonial? Johnson seems to imply that Indigenous students are by reason of ancestry or circumstance unable to demonstrate that they are capable thinkers and communicators. I doubt that was his intention. However, it seems very similar to the incorrect inferences drawn about women; namely that they are by constitution incapable of being pilots, surgeons, entrepreneurs, etc.  

There are three crucial omissions from Johnson’s article. One is the fact that the First Nations Leadership Council supports the use of the Foundation Skills Assessment as “. . . one among many tools necessary to address the ‘racism of low expectations’ experienced by First Nations learners as identified by the BC Auditor General in their 2015 report.” The second is that Indigenous educators are involved in item development for the assessment. The third is that the assessments contain First Peoples content written by and about First Peoples, and their development is guided by the First Peoples Principles of Learning.  

It is for these reasons that I hope Johnson will revise his article in the Times Colonist.

Educational Discrimination: How far have we come?

Educational Discrimination: How far have we come?

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia

[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]

 

Social justice has been a theme in UBC’s teacher education program for many years. The Faculty of Education has had an Indigenous Teacher Education Program for almost fifty years. The program was once called the Native Indian Teacher Education. Beginning in the late 1980s, one of the courses required of all pre-service teachers included a mandatory unit on what was referred to at the time as “Aboriginal Education.”

Cognizant that there is no simple correspondence between knowledge and behavior, one of my colleagues at UBC and I were curious to find out whether pre-service students would make discriminatory judgements about the performance of Aboriginal students. We created an experiment.[i] We asked 50 pre-service teachers to make placement decisions based on the records of 24 fictitious students. We constructed a record for each student that described each student’s prior academic performance from grade four through grade seven in language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, music and art. 

On one set of eight records, we indicated that the fictitious school board had received funding to provide Aboriginal programming for the students in that set. On a second set of records, identical to the first, we included information indicating that the school board had received funding to provide services for ESL students.  No such information was included on the third identical set, leading the pre-service teachers to infer that the students were neither of Aboriginal ancestry nor students for whom English was a second language. 

We randomized the order of presentation of all the records on a secure website to which pre-service teachers had access and invited them to volunteer for a study to examine and review the student records. 50 pre-service teachers volunteered to take part. The 50 students were enrolled in a course required of all teachers during the final term in the teacher preparation program. The first term of that program included a mandatory unit that addressed social and educational situations of females, "Aboriginal" people, persons with disabilities and persons for whom English was not a first language. 

In our on-line study the 50 pre-service teachers were told that they were taking part in a task designed to explore the kinds of decisions that beginning teachers make about the programs to which students should be assigned when they make the transition from elementary to secondary school.  The volunteers were asked to (a) review the 24 randomized fictitious student records, (b) consider the criteria for three program options (remedial, standard or advanced), and (c) use a scale from 1 to 10 [with one representing the remedial program (Supplementary Learning Assistance), five representing the standard program (Regular Grade Eight Program) and ten the advanced program (Rapid Advance Program)] to indicate their recommendation regarding the program best suited to each student.  The volunteers were encouraged to use the full range of numbers from one to ten to locate their recommendation for each student as close to the program to which they thought the student best suited. The volunteers were told to make their decision based on student marks, ignoring any other information on the record card.

Of course, if the pre-service teachers paid attention only to the prior achievement of students, students with high prior achievement should have received higher ratings and students whose achievement had been poor should have received lower ratings. However, when we compared the volunteers’ recommendations for “Aboriginal students” and “non-Aboriginal’ students, we found significant differences between some volunteers’ rating of supposedly Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students. Aboriginal students were assigned lower recommendations than their non-Aboriginal counterparts even though the fictional students in both groups had identical records of prior achievement. The decisions of some of the teachers were clearly discriminatory. Enough so that the differences in the scores assigned were significant.

We conducted our study a bit more than a dozen years ago. Since then reconciliation, de-colonization, and Indigenization have become prominent themes in education, including teacher education. One would hope that a replication of that study today would show a marked improvement in outcomes.  

Reconciliation is about creating understanding of the devastating impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous people and eliminating its continuing influence. In education, we can still see manifestations of the lingering effects of colonialism in the graduation rate gap between Indigenous learners and their non-Indigenous peers, the enrollment gap in academically challenging courses, and in higher rates of early school leaving. Lower expectations on the part of some educators and administrators can be an important contributing factor.

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[i] Riley, T. & C. Ungerleider (2008) Preservice Teachers’ Discriminatory Judgments. The Alberta Journal of Educational Research. 54(4) 378-387.