Understanding the rural - urban reading gap - November 2002

2. Urban students outperform rural students in reading

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In the PISA 2000 study, Canadian students performed very well by international standards. Canada scored near the top in reading performance. Only students in Finland performed significantly better than Canadian students in reading. Other countries that performed as well as Canada were New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, and Japan.³

While these results are noteworthy, rural students did not perform quite so well. At the national level, students from urban schools significantly outperformed students from rural schools in reading. In all provinces, except Nova Scotia and Manitoba, there were differences in the reading performance of rural and urban students. In only four of these provinces, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Alberta, were the differences significant.⁴ It is worth noting, however, that rural students in Alberta still performed well, exceeding the Canadian national average, and better than urban students in some other provinces.

Urban students significantly outperformed rural students in Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Alberta. However, rural students in Alberta still performed well, exceeding the national average and scoring better than urban students in some other provinces.

Figure 1
Mean reading scores for students in urban and rural schools compared to provincial averages

Table 1
Student performance in reading for rural and urban schools

	Reading Performance
	Rural schools	Urban schools	Provincial average
Newfoundland and Labrador	501	538	517
Prince Edward Island	504	526	517
Nova Scotia	519	522	521
New Brunswick	491	510	501
Quebec	527	538	536
Ontario	520	535	533
Manitoba	527	531	529
Saskatchewan	523	533	529
Alberta	536	557	550
British Columbia	530	539	538
Canada	523	538	534
Note: Scores are standardized with an OECD mean of 500, and a standard deviation of 100. Where rural-urban differences in average scores are statistically significant with a 99% level of confidence, scores are bolded.

In the international context of the PISA study, students in all provinces performed well in reading literacy. In fact, all ten provinces performed above the OECD average (of 500). At the provincial level, students in Alberta performed significantly better than the Canadian average. Students in Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, however, performed at levels significantly lower than the Canadian average.

The performance of rural students generally followed the same geographic pattern as the overall provincial averages. However, while the overall provincial results for Nova Scotia were similar to the other Atlantic Provinces, the rural-urban difference in performance that appeared in Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick did not show up in Nova Scotia. In fact, results for Nova Scotian rural students were not significantly lower than for rural students in the rest of Canada. Again, Alberta stood out with an average reading performance for rural students significantly above the national rural average.

The existence of the rural-urban differences in reading performance in some provinces raises an important question: What are the characteristics of rural students, schools, and communities that can explain these lower results? In what ways are rural students different from urban students and which of these differences lies behind their lower performance? The first part of this analysis describes how rural and urban students and their environments differ (Section 3). This leads to a discussion of the characteristics of students, their families, schools and communities that best explain the different results for rural and urban students (Section 4). Finally, there is a discussion of school characteristics that were not reported at the highest levels in rural schools in order to identify which of these characteristics has a strong relationship with student achievement. (Section 5).

The relative size of rural populations varies by province. While 58% of Newfoundland and Labrador students were in rural schools, only about 15% of students in British Columbia and Ontario were in rural schools.

Figure 2
Percentage of students attending rural schools by province

The relative size of rural populations differs considerably by province.⁵ In Newfoundland and Labrador, over half of the 15-year-olds in the PISA study were in rural schools. Considering the low reading performance of these rural youth, it is clear that the overall provincial results are strongly influenced by the results of students in the rural schools. In Alberta, on the other hand, rural students, who also performed at levels significantly lower than their urban counterparts, represented less than one-third of the total student population and thus had a lesser impact on the overall provincial results.

The provinces with the largest proportion of rural students were Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan. Urban student populations were the most dominant in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec.

• ³The PISA 2000 assessment tested students in reading, mathematics and science literacy. However, only a sub-sample of students was tested in mathematics and science. As a result, a full analysis of mathematics and science literacy in rural and urban student populations was not possible due to restrictions of sample size. For example, partly as a result of sample size, differences in the mathematics and science performance of rural and urban students were not statistically significant in most provinces. In mathematics, only in Newfoundland and Labrador was there a significant difference between the performance of rural and urban students. In science, rural-urban gaps were significant only in Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Alberta.
• ⁴In Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Alberta, the difference in reading performance of rural and urban students was statistically significant with a 99% level of confidence. In Ontario, the rural-urban gap was significant with a 95% level of confidence.
• ⁵The PISA assessment was implemented in each province through provincial ministries of education. On-reserve schools that do not fall within provincial jurisdiction were not included in the PISA study. As a result, there will be some under-coverage of rural student populations.

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