Literacy in Ontario class rooms at 10 year low, putting students at risk, report says

With literacy skills nosediving in provincial classrooms, some experts believe Ontario’s young students are at risk.

According to a recent report from Brain Power Enrichment Programs, an Ontario-based third-party educational platform, reading proficiency in Ontario school programs — as low as Grade 3 — has dropped from 74 per cent to 53 per cent in the last decade.

As a byproduct of this shift in standards, Brain Power’s report noted that further loss of high learning capacity in classrooms throughout the province may be right around the corner.

According to the report, the formatting of reading comprehension in Ontario classrooms, such as multiple-choice answers that appear on a screen, may be a leading cause of student disengagement.

Potential workarounds for this issue include cross-disciplinary engagement that would present literacy and reading as a way to invent and create, as opposed to just answering a question presented.

Brain Power also relayed in the report that, as AI becomes a fixture in both education and the workforce, programs that encourage critical thinking, problem solving, and multi-tasking across reading disciplines are a way to provide the youth of Ontario with a foothold in a likely automated future.