ARCHIVED – Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada – Performance results by LINC level

Introduction

The following analysis looks at the LINC program by specific LINC level. For each of the levels, the following three broad characteristics are examined:

  • Number of clients in training at a specified LINC level.
  • Number of clients who have completed courses at a specified LINC level.
  • Average number of hours taken to complete a course at the specified LINC level.

The clients being referred to in each specific LINC level for this analysis are unique clients. That is, clients can only be counted 1 time per year for a specific LINC level, even if the clients have participated more than once in the same level of training during the calendar year. A client may be counted in more than 1 specific LINC level per year. This situation may arise if a client takes training or completes LINC courses at different LINC levels during the same calendar year. [ Note 1 ]

The number of clients in training and competing courses is consistent with data runs completed through February 2009. There exists a possibility that the most recent LINC training and completions data from all service provider organizations (SPOs) has not been captured in the current cut of iCAMS and HARTS data and therefore client counts in the most recent years may be understated. Also note that LINC data from Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia are not captured in iCAMS or HARTs due to Alternative Funding Arrangements with CIC.

The completion rate referred to in this analysis refers to the number of unique clients completing LINC courses at a certain LINC level divided by the number of unique clients training at the same LINC level and this rate is expressed as a percent.

For this analysis the average hours taken to complete courses corresponds to an adjusted average (mean) number of hours taken to complete each LINC courses during 2005-2008. Note that adjustments have been made to exclude records that are inconsistent with “normal” durations associated with LINC language training. As a result, records with negative, zero, very small or extremely high numbers of hours taken to complete a course have been excluded. [ Note 2 ]


  1. Adding all the unique clients by LINC level does not equal the unique client count presented in Section 1 (Table 1) of the accompanying report due to the double counting that is present for some clients when decomposing the LINC program by each specific level by calendar year.
  2. For this analysis, it is assumed that the average hours taken to complete a LINC level reflects a normal distribution that clusters around the mean. However, due to the nature of administrative data and the possibility of data-entry errors, outliers were removed and the mean scores represent the mean of the center 99.7% of the distribution.

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