School board hopes PALS delivers success

The Thunder Bay Catholic District School Board saw 66 per cent of its students functioning at the proper reading levels according to its Education Quality Accountability Office’s standardized test results.

With the province asking school boards to have their students aim for 75 per cent, the Catholic board went looking for a way to achieve that.

"We knew we had to start doing something different to get those scores from 66 and move them on up," said superintendent of elementary and special education Joan Powell. "We think we could aim even higher."

Through their research, they came across the Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) program and implemented the program in September.

"We had seen the results elsewhere and read about it in research," Powell said. "We were expecting the program would be successful but we didn’t have any idea how successful it would be."

PALS is delivered for 40 minutes per school day by either a special education teacher or planning preparation teacher to all students in primary classes. A student with strong reading skills is paired up with a weaker reader and together participate in a series of lessons and activities to improve letter sound fluency and word fluency.

Queen’s University third-year PHD candidate Chris Mattatall moved to the city from Kingston for the year to help the school board implement the program and is studying its effects for his dissertation. He said the PALS activities come with a lot of repetition, practice, corrective feedback and is seeing positive results.

Mattatall and the board set a goal to have their Grade 1 student’s reach the goal of being able to recognize 50 letter sounds per minute and 50 words per minute. By April 1, they had jumped form 19.17 letters per minutes to 55.85, exceeding the goal.

The Grade 1s began the year knowing an average of 10.72 words per minute and with two months left in the school year, were already at 49.28 words per minute.

"It seems like it’s really solidifying some of those early reading skills," Mattatall said, adding teachers have said their students this year are further ahead than any classes they’ve had before and they believe it’s because of PALS.
Powell said the board is most proud of how successful their at-risk students have been after using the PALS program.

"Those are the ones who started out way below where we wanted them to be at the beginning of the year; they are on a trajectory of success that actually succeeds the slope for the average achieving or high achieving students," she said.

"They’re just on their way to reading success in a way we’ve never seen before. Those at-risk kids have disappeared off our charts now because they are performing so well."