"Should use problem solving skills to solve problems."
That's the perplexing phrase Annie Kidder encountered recently when her 12-year-old daughter, Katie, brought home a school report card.
For Ms. Kidder, executive director of Toronto-based People For Education, an independent lobby group, the comment was a perfect example of the problem that increasingly seems to plague student evaluations: a failure to communicate.
"The language of the comments section," Ms. Kidder complains, "is so full of jargon that it makes no sense."
In Ontario, however, there are signs that officials are starting to hear the message of reform. A pilot program allowing teachers more flexibility in recording comments is now being tested in 19 Toronto schools, and will be rolled out across the city in the fall.
The pilot initiative came after years of complaints from parents, teachers and administrators about the murky pedagogical prose of performance assessments.
Writing in a recent blog, Almonte, Ont. parent Chantal Hubert cited an oxymoronic line in her daughter Erin's first grade report card recommending that she "continue to develop communication ability using simple language."
"Unless you're an educator," Ms. Hubert added in an interview, "you can't understand the comments. They have very little meaning to me as a parent. 'The student reads with considerable efficiency.' What does 'considerable' mean? Good?"
Such opaque language seems to be even more unsuitable in urban centres like Toronto and Vancouver, with their diverse cultural mosaics, and large immigrant populations.
"I'm a fairly literate person," says Toronto School Board Trustee Howard Goodman, "with a definite interest in pedagogy, and I find some of the language really odd. You can only extract the meaning with real difficulty. Remember, 71 per cent of the kids in our system have parents who were born outside of Canada."
Teachers, too, have long chafed under a regimen that requires report card comments to reflect the abstract formulations of provincial curriculum guidelines. The Mike Harris Conservative government introduced standardized report cards with a new curriculum in 1998, seeking to establish consistency in evaluation.
"We believe standardized comments are not the best way of speaking about a specific child," said Mr. Goodman, who last fall championed Toronto's pilot program.
The pilot format allows teachers to choose between the old style and the new, though some may feel the changes don't go far enough.
For example, in Grade 4 math, the guide suggests evaluating students based on their ability to "demonstrate an understanding of equality betweens pairs of expressions, using addiction, subtraction and multiplication."
The new language is shorter - "compares two number sentences to find if they are equal or not" - but still vague.
Karen Grose, the Toronto District School Board's system superintendent, says parents, teachers and principals will be surveyed on the format. Changes will be incorporated for the next version, to be rolled out in schools this fall.
"We want the language of Dr. Seuss," says Mr. Goodman. "Not the language of Martin Heidegger."