The Quadmester system instituted by the St. Clair Catholic District School Board has been a big success.
Under the system, students remain is one class every day for an entire week. They will take a second course the following week.
The system was implemented primarily as a way to limit students’ contacts on any given day to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in schools.
Director of Education Deb Crawford calls it something of a silver lining for pandemic education.
“We have our secondary quadmester results coming in, and we’ve seen more benefits to the quadmester model that we have in place in our high schools than we had anticipated.”
Crawford says the long-term exposure to one course at a time seems to be working.
“You can predict future success by looking at the math and English results in students in their grade 9 and 10 years and their credit accumulation,” Crawford says. “Looking at our five year average for students that are taking applied math and English courses in 9 and 10, and academic math and English in 9 and 10, the moved up three, four, five per cent overall.”
95% of the students in grade 9 earned both credits in the first quadmester.