Grade 3 Immersion Students' Performance in Literacy and Mathematics: Province-wide Results from Ontario (1998-99)

In 1996, the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) 1 introduced a provincial testing program for all students at Grades 3 and 6 in Ontario. This created a unique opportunity to investigate French immersion students' performance on tests of English reading and writing and mathematics some 25 years after many of the large-scale evaluations of French immersion programs were first conducted. In this study, we compare immersion and non-immersion students' results on the Grade 3 tests in 1998-99. We also explore the results by immersion program type, that is according to (a) the grade at which English literacy instruction is introduced, and (b) the proportion of instructional time in English. The results from this study corroborate those of large-scale evaluation studies of French immersion programs conducted some 25 years ago.