Teaching Adults to Write to communicate

We also mentioned this resource in Collection 3. If you need it, you can download it here.

There are three ideas for diagnostic writing assessments that you can use or adapt to your trade or another training context. If you already know what you’re doing for your contextualised literacy assessment you can skip this.

Attitude to writing learner self-assessment

• Here you’ll find attitudes to writing self-assessment questions. We’d recommend just focusing on what you need and cutting out the rest. At three pages long, it’s more likely to intimate learners with anxieties about writing in its current format.
• You can find the self-assessment survey instructions on pages 14 and the full version of on pages 61-63.

Using writing portfolios or journals

• There’s only a short write up here on using portfolios, but it’s a good idea. If you use the level 1 literacy unit standards you’ll notice that they take a similar approach. If you need to embed anything on writing, you should look at using a portfolio approach for part of it.
• The description is on page 15.

Mapping samples of learners’ writing using Learning Progressions

• We didn’t discuss it in Collection 4, but there is a writing assessment option in the TEC Assessment Tool. If you need to assess and teach writing in a serious way you should investigate that option and then come back to this.
• The Assessment Tool writing option is not marked by the computer, but relies on having a tutor is trained in assessing writing.
• Pages 15-23 tell you how to set up a writing assessment and then use the Writing Progressions to assess your learners’ writing.
• Like some of the other ideas in these resources, this is a time-intensive process so it won’t work for everyone.
• There are also writing frame template on pages 65 to 66 that you could experiment with if you did try this.

Next, we switch over to numeracy.