Newfoundland and Labrador has updated parts of its school curriculums at the start of a new school year, and plans to bring more of the curriculum pieces online over the next year. (iStock)

A new school year means new curriculum in French, mathematics and social studies in Newfoundland and Labrador, and plans to modernize learning and test through a new online portal for students and teachers.

The provincial government has recently digitized the K-12 curriculum, while updating parts of the curriculum for the 2024 school year, including French in Grades K-3, Grade 9 social studies, and applied mathematics 2202 and 3202.

Scott Linehan, an assistant deputy minister with the province’s education department, said that also includes the hiring of 16 math program specialists — 15 in the English school system and one in the French system.

“These 16 program specialists will work with hand in hand with principals, with teachers, with students to engage in mathematics on instructional approaches, mentoring best practices on how we can engage with mathematics.” Linehan said in an interview with CBC’s Newfoundland Morning.

Data from 2022 for the Programme for International Student Assessments showed students in Newfoundland and Labrador scored below national averages in mathematics, science and reading testing.

The province is also launching a new digital curriculum platform for the 2024 school year, called Enlightened, which Linehan hopes will make the curriculum a more interactive and collaborative learning resource.

“If you’re a Grade 7 teacher and you have this amazing resource for Grade 7 science, you can put in a tag on Enlightened [and] our team will review that,” said Linehan.

“If we vet that and that meets our standards, we think that’s an excellent resource, we’ll add that to the Enlightened platform. And then the teachers in Harbour Breton, Corner Brook, Goose Bay can all use that resource if they so choose.”

The Grade 7-9 curriculum will be available on the platform this month, with the K-12 curriculum available by September 2025.

A personalized approach

Linehan said the education department also plans to introduce a new intermediate curriculum for Grades 7-9 next September, aimed at giving students more choice over the courses they want to complete.

“As students progress through their schooling years, the engagement kind of dips off a little bit. So what we want to do is we want to raise that engagement. We want students to not only have to come to school, but they want to be in school,” he said.

“Students will continue to do the core curricular subjects, English and mathematics and science … but we want to cater our curriculum so that students who have a particular interest in other subject areas, other disciplines, could explore that interest a little further.”

For example, Linehan said a student interested in music over art could choose to do more music instead of a visual arts course.

“While we want to ensure that we have a comprehensive programming of a suite of courses for students, we want to give the students a little more, you know, choice and agency in some of the courses that really, really interest them.”

Public exams have also been replaced with what the province calls modular exams, which students enrolled in senior-level courses will take three times a year.

Under the modular system, Linehan said students will be tested on subject matter from the first third of the year when it’s completed, and be worth 10 per cent of the overall grade. That repeats — with changes — for the second third of the curriculum.

“If students were not particularly pleased with the grade they received on the first term, they can redo [it] and be retested on that third of the year,” he said, adding the same would opportunity would be given for the third exam at the end of the year.

“This is really about giving students opportunities to demonstrate their consolidation of learning, so that a score that they previously received doesn’t handcuff them going forward.”

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