The assessment
What is assessed — mathematics
Forty questions, four strands, fixed proportions — and every expectation behind them.
It draws on Grades 1 to 3, not just Grade 3. The focus is Grade 3 expectations, but questions may involve content from Grades 1 and 2. A gap left unclosed in Grade 2 can surface here.
Some expectations cannot be assessed this way, and EQAO says so. Anything requiring a teacher to watch a child do something — reading aloud with expression, explaining which planning strategy helped — is marked in the blueprint as unmeasurable by a large-scale assessment. Those expectations still matter; they are the classroom teacher's to judge.
The blueprint, by strand
Forty operational questions. The proportions are fixed, and every student answers the same number from each strand regardless of how they are routed.
Financial Literacy is folded into Number because it has only one specific expectation at this grade — F1.1, calculating change.
This surprises people who assume mathematics means arithmetic. Ten questions come from geometry and measurement — 3-D properties, congruence, movement on a grid, perimeter, metric length, capacity, mass, time, and area. In the Grade 3 curriculum, E2 Measurement alone carries nine specific expectations, the largest single block in the year.
What is not assessed
- Strand A — Social-Emotional Learning skills and the Mathematical Processes. Students may need to use the processes, but no question is mapped to them.
C4Mathematical Modelling — there are currently no EQAO questions mapped to this overall expectation, and no specific expectations under it.- Communication — of the four achievement chart categories, mathematics questions map to only three. There is no open-response mathematics question at Grade 3 and nothing to explain in words.
A child does not need to write mathematical explanations to do well on this assessment. They do need to reason — the Thinking category is well represented — but the reasoning is expressed by choosing correctly, not by justifying. This is a legitimate reason not to spend April on “explain your thinking” worksheets. It is not a reason to stop teaching explanation, which is how the reasoning gets built in the first place.
The three categories
Every question is mapped to one of these. All three appear in every stage.
| Category | A question lands here when the student must… |
|---|---|
| Knowledge and Understanding | demonstrate content knowledge and/or comprehension of its meaning — basic knowledge or understanding of a concept |
| Application | select the appropriate tool, or get the necessary information and fit it to the problem |
| Thinking | select and sequence a variety of tools, or demonstrate a critical thinking process such as reasoning — they may need to make a plan |
A question can move from Knowledge and Understanding to Application purely by adding a context, or by removing a tool the student would otherwise have been given. The mathematics is identical; the demand is not. This is exactly why children who are fluent on a worksheet stumble on a word problem — the assessment is deliberately measuring that difference.
Every expectation, strand by strand
B. Number — B1 Number Sense
B1.1 | Read, represent, compose and decompose whole numbers to 1000 |
B1.2 | Compare and order whole numbers to 1000 |
B1.3 | Round to the nearest ten or hundred |
B1.4 | Count to 1000, including by 50s, 100s and 200s |
B1.5 | Place value in multi-digit numbers, including with base ten materials |
B1.6 | Fair-share problems, up to 20 items among 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 10 sharers — whole numbers, mixed numbers, fractional amounts |
B1.7 | Equivalent fractions — halves/fourths/eighths, thirds/sixths, fifths/tenths |
Number Sense runs B1.1 to B1.7. Comparing and ordering unit fractions is B1.8 in Grade 1 — a prerequisite for this year's work, not part of it. Why this is easy to get wrong.
B. Number — B2 Operations
B2.1 | Properties of operations and the relationship between multiplication and division |
B2.2 | Recall multiplication facts of 2, 5 and 10, and related division facts |
B2.3 | Mental math including estimation, addition and subtraction to 1000 |
B2.4 | Understanding why the algorithms work |
B2.5 | Solve addition and subtraction problems to 1000 |
B2.6 | Represent multiplication to 10 × 10 and division to 100 ÷ 10, including arrays |
B2.7 | Multiplication and division problems, including groups of one half, one fourth, one third |
B2.8 | Numerator as repeated addition of the unit fraction, in standard notation |
B2.9 | Ratios of 1 to 2, 1 to 5, 1 to 10 to scale up and solve problems |
It sits last in a long strand and reads like a footnote — but it is the expectation behind the proportional-scaling question where Level 2 students scored 27% against Level 3's 75%, one of the sharpest level-separating items in the released set. Check it is on your long-range plan.
F. Financial Literacy
F1.1 | Estimate and calculate change for simple cash transactions — whole dollars and amounts under a dollar |
C. Algebra
C1.1 | Identify and describe repeating elements and operations in patterns |
C1.2 | Create and translate patterns across representations — shapes, numbers, tables of values |
C1.3 | Determine pattern rules, extend, predict, find missing elements |
C1.4 | Create and describe patterns showing relationships among whole numbers to 1000 |
C2.1 | Variables — how they are used |
C2.2 | Whether sets of expressions are equivalent or not |
C2.3 | Equivalent relationships for whole numbers to 1000 |
C3.1 | Write and execute code — sequential, concurrent and repeating events |
C3.2 | Read and alter existing code, and describe how changes affect outcomes |
C4 | Mathematical modelling — no questions mapped |
D. Data
D1.1 | Sort by two and three attributes using tables and logic diagrams — Venn, Carroll and tree diagrams |
D1.2 | Collect data; organise using frequency tables |
D1.3 | Display data using many-to-one correspondence in pictographs and bar graphs, with appropriate scales |
D1.4 | Determine the mean; identify the mode(s) |
D1.5 | Analyse data sets in graphs with different scales; draw conclusions |
D2.1 | Impossible, unlikely, equally likely, likely, certain — and predictions from them |
D2.2 | Predict whether mean and mode will be the same across different populations |
E. Spatial Sense — E1 Geometric and Spatial Reasoning
E1.1 | Sort, construct and identify cubes, prisms, pyramids, cylinders, cones by faces, edges, vertices, angles |
E1.2 | Compose and decompose structures; identify the 2-D shapes and 3-D objects in them |
E1.3 | Congruence of lengths, angles and faces |
E1.4 | Multistep movement instructions — distances, half- and quarter-turns |
E. Spatial Sense — E2 Measurement
E2.1 | Perimeter of polygons and curved shapes; construct polygons to a given perimeter |
E2.2 | Relationships between millimetres, centimetres, metres, kilometres; benchmarks |
E2.3 | Capacity in non-standard units; the effect of overfilling, underfilling and gaps |
E2.4 | Mass using a pan balance and non-standard units |
E2.5 | Different-sized units measuring the same attribute — different count, same size |
E2.6 | Analog and digital clocks: hours, minutes and seconds |
E2.7 | Compare areas by matching, covering, decomposing and recomposing |
E2.8 | Area in non-standard units; the effect of gaps and overlaps |
E2.9 | Square centimetres and square metres |