Evidence
Where marks are actually lost
EQAO's own evidence on what defeats students who are close to the standard.
The Level 2 study (published August 2025) analyses what students at Level 2 — the group nearest the standard — actually chose on 83 single-selection questions, and why. It covers the 2022–23 administration and draws examples from the 2023 released questions. Its themes are stable and its instructional implications are the most useful thing EQAO has published; the specific figures describe a cohort three years before the one you are teaching.
The released questions with provincial data (November 2025) show what percentage of students at each level selected each option, from a more recent administration.
Where a percentage is given below, the source is named. Where a pattern of reasoning is described, that comes from the Level 2 study and should be treated as a durable finding rather than a current statistic.
EQAO's four themes
1 · Proportional reasoning — the big one
What Level 2 students could do: add and subtract accurately when told explicitly to do so.
Reaching for addition when the situation requires multiplication. Asked how many bananas are in a box holding four times as many as six apples, students at Level 2 tended to choose ten. They correctly recognised that the answer should grow — and then added. The mirror image appeared in division: asked how many groups of five are in 45, they chose 40. They recognised a reduction, and subtracted.
The child knows the direction and picks the wrong operation. It is not a computation failure; it is additive thinking applied to a multiplicative situation.
Scales on number lines. Given a number line whose tick marks advanced in fives, only about a third of Level 2 students identified two labelled points correctly, against over half at Level 3. The failure was not arithmetic — it was not grasping that a number line's scale must be consistent.
Area, answered halfway. Shown a book partly covered with identical square tiles and asked how many more tiles were needed, only a quarter of Level 2 students answered correctly. The dominant wrong answer was the number of tiles already there. They did the first step and stopped.
2 · Algebraic reasoning
What Level 2 students could do: continue a pattern that skip-counts by tens.
Equivalence. Asked which expression equals 4 × 2, students in difficulty chose 4 ÷ 2 — inverse operations conflated. Asked for an expression equal to a number such as 345, they gravitated to an addition option even when the correct answer involved subtraction.
Missing digits. Given a subtraction with two digits blanked out, about a third of Level 2 students found them, against over half at Level 3. The characteristic error was subtracting where regrouping required addition.
Shrinking patterns, and applying the rule to every term. Given a pattern decreasing by six each time, roughly half of Level 2 students found it, against more than 80% at Level 3. The revealing detail: they tended to pick a sequence whose second number was right and whose later numbers drifted. They applied the rule once and then estimated.
Pictograph keys. Asked to read a pictograph where each symbol stood for four items, about 40% of Level 2 students answered correctly against 85% at Level 3. The wrong answer was counting the symbols — one-to-one correspondence, ignoring the key.
3 · Computational thinking
Multi-step problems in general, and two kinds in particular.
Movement on a grid. Asked to describe a route involving forward moves and a turn, Level 2 students made two errors, often together: counting the starting square as a move, and swapping clockwise and counterclockwise.
Calculating change. Only a third of Level 2 students handled a change question correctly, against three quarters at Level 3. The structure defeats them: subtract to find the change, then add up a set of coins to find which option matches. Two operations, in sequence, with a representation change in between.
4 · Mathematical language
What Level 2 students could do: use certain and impossible correctly.
Likely and unlikely. About 55% of Level 2 students against 85% at Level 3. The misconception is precise and worth naming: they treat “likely” as meaning “possible”. Anything that could happen is likely. The idea of a continuum from impossible to certain, with degrees in between, has not landed.
Coding vocabulary. Asked which line of code was a loop, or which would repeat an instruction a set number of times, Level 2 students struggled — the terminology, not the logic.
Faces, edges and vertices. About half of Level 2 students could not correctly count them on a given 3-D object.
Mode. Asked for the mode from a frequency table, they chose the largest value rather than the most frequent one.
The hardest released questions
From the November 2025 released set. Bars show the share of students at each level who answered correctly. Several are questions most people would assume are easy.
On the pattern-rule question, the majority of students who met the provincial standard got it wrong — and so did 43% of Level 4 students. Same for the area-difference question and the pyramid question. These are not questions that separate strong from weak students; they are questions almost everyone finds hard.
Going from 17 to 29 means three steps, not two. Children count the numbers they can see rather than the gaps between them, divide by the wrong figure, and produce a rule that is plausible and wrong. The fix is one habit: draw the arrows, count the arrows. Not the numbers — the arrows.
A pyramid with five triangular faces sits on a pentagon. Getting there needs a child to know that a pyramid's base is not one of the triangles, and to connect five to pentagon. Most Level 3 students chose square — the pyramid they have seen in books.
And the ones that were easy
Worth knowing too, so that time is not spent where it is not needed. At Level 3, over 85% answered correctly on:
Single-step questions in familiar clothing are largely secure by Level 3. What separates the levels is multi-step work, precise vocabulary, and proportional reasoning.
The provincial picture
Where the province sits, from the 2024–25 results for students in English-language schools. Useful for calibration: it tells you what “normal” looks like before you decide anything is wrong.
| Component | Met the standard | Students | Three-year trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reading | 74% | 117 179 | 73% → 71% → 74% — increasing |
| Writing | 65% | 117 425 | 65% → 64% → 65% — flat |
| Mathematics | 64% | 123 219 | 60% → 61% → 64% — increasing |
It has not moved in three years, and it sits nine points below reading. If a school is choosing one thing to work on, the province's own data points there.
Of the 27% of students at Level 2 in mathematics — 33 831 children — almost half were at a high Level 2, close to the standard and demonstrating most of what is needed for subsequent grades. The gap for a large number of children is genuinely small.
Students with special education needs
| Component | Met the standard | Trend |
|---|---|---|
| Reading | 49% | 47% → 45% → 49% — increasing |
| Writing | 36% | 38% → 38% → 36% — decreasing |
| Mathematics | 33% | 29% → 31% → 33% — increasing |
Writing is the one component moving the wrong way for this group, and by a widening margin against the provincial figure.
English language learners
| Component | Met the standard | Trend |
|---|---|---|
| Reading | 63% | 65% → 59% → 63% |
| Writing | 53% | 59% → 53% → 53% |
| Mathematics | 53% | 55% → 53% → 53% |
What students say about themselves
From the Student Questionnaire, which 97% of participating students completed. Worth reading beside the achievement data.
| Reading | Writing | Mathematics | |
|---|---|---|---|
| “I like it” | 71% | 56% | 67% |
| “I'm good at it” | 74% | 59% | 64% |
| “Being good at it matters to me” | 67% | 63% | 72% |
| “It's one of my favourite things” | 46% | 33% | 55% |
Writing is the least liked, the least confident, the least chosen — and the lowest scoring. Whatever the causal direction, the two move together, and no amount of practice tasks will shift the second without touching the first.
On mindset: 89% of students believe a person can always get better at mathematics, and 73% believe almost everyone can understand mathematics if they work at it. 79% say they keep trying after a mistake.
On technology: 33% of students indicated they are able to use the internet at home to complete school work, and 54% indicated they use technology to learn new things.
It is reported here exactly as EQAO reports it, but it is strikingly low against what most teachers observe, and self-report by eight-year-olds on a question of that phrasing is not a robust measure of household connectivity. Do not cite it as an access statistic. What it does support is the narrower and safer point: do not assume every child arrives fluent with a school device, and do not let the sample test be the first time they meet one.