Next, you need to develop and use your own contextualised literacy assessment that targets a specific skill that you want to strengthen. You’ll need to use this with your learners and report back on the results.

Where are the examples for me to look at?

They’re coming. You can skip ahead and come back here if you like. Just make sure you understand the requirements are.

Before we get to the examples, we need to make sure that you’re clear about the connections between what you mapped earlier, the broad strategies and much narrower learning outcomes that you wrote, these diagnostics that you’re planning, and the teaching activities you’ll design to go with them.

How does my contextualised literacy diagnostic fit into the embedding process?

Here’s a review of how the embedding process works and how you should be thinking about where you’re up to:

Knowing the demands.

• You know the literacy demands. You’ve already mapped key demands of your programme and some samples of your teaching material (Assessment 3). This allowed you to design some broad strategies for embedding important aspects of literacy into your programme. You also drafted some more specific learning outcomes for embedding into your teaching (Assessment 4).

Knowing the learner.

• You’re up to here. You can use one of the Assessment Tool options to get some “big picture” diagnostic information about your learners. You can ask your learners to self-assess so you can measure their confidence. Now, you need to zoom in and get some very specific literacy diagnostic information about your learners. You need to revisit the learning outcomes you wrote and use them to design a contextualised assessment. You can use this now for diagnostic purposes (Assessment 5) and then again later to measure progress (Assessment 7).

Knowing what to do.

• That’s your next task (Assessment 6). Once you’ve designed and used your contextualised literacy assessment you’ll have quite a lot of information about where your learners are at in terms of their literacy abilities. And you can use this information to plan and then facilitate at least three sessions with your learners. This is where you embed very targeted literacy content into your own teaching content and context.

Do I have to use a contextualised literacy diagnostic?

Contextualising assessments is an important part of the embedding process. And yes, you have to use a contextualised assessment for both literacy and numeracy.

It’s up to you whether you create something from scratch though. You are welcome to adapt or modify an existing diagnostic.

We’ll show you plenty of examples so you’re welcome to contextualise one of the ones that we show you. Or, if you already have some in your organisation you can use those.

If you’re using an already designed diagnostic it has to be “fit for purpose”. This means that you have to make sure it really matches the needs of your programme and your learners.

Also, you need to make sure that the links are clear from your learning outcome for embedding literacy to this diagnostic assessment and on to your teaching activities and resources.

When you write up your results in the template for Assessment 5 you’ll be able to let us know which direction you took with this.

What do I have to provide as evidence for the NZCALNE (Voc)?

As supporting evidence for this qualification, you need to supply completed contextualised literacy diagnostics for at least two learners. These are the same two learners from your group that you are working with through Assessments 5, 6 and 7.

You should supply these assessments electronically as scans or images once your learners have completed them.

You can blank out learner names if you need to make them anonymous. Just make sure that they are the same Learner A and Learner B all the way through.

Here it is again. You’ll need to collect and then supply scanned copies or images as follows:

• Learner A: Completed contextualised literacy diagnostic assessment.
• Learner B: Completed contextualised literacy diagnostic assessment.

Next up: How to create your own contextualised vocabulary diagnostic and examples of other literacy diagnostics you can adapt or modify.