Examples of literacy diagnostic assessments from the Learning Progressions Resources

You may already have a good idea of what you want to do for your contextualised literacy diagnostic. If you’re unsure, vocabulary is a good option.

Or you may wish to tackle other specific literacy skills. If you do, the supporting resources for the Learning Progressions contain a range of different diagnostic assessments that you could use for ideas or modify to suit your context.

• Skip this section if you already know what you are doing for your contextualised literacy diagnostic.

But if you’re still looking for ideas, here is a smorgasbord of mostly generic diagnostic assessments that you could contextualise for your own purposes.

Teaching Adults to Listen and speak to communicate

You might have already downloaded this publication when you were working on Collection 3. If not, you can download it here.

There are four ideas for diagnostic assessments. If you already know what you’re doing for your contextualised literacy assessment you can skip this. 

Tutor checklist for observing discussions

• This tutor checklist could be useful if you wanted to focus your learning outcome on interactive listening and speaking including group discussion in a particular context.
• You can find it on pages 10-11 and 57 of the PDF download or in the printed version if you have one.
• Even if you don’t use it, the idea of using a checklist for assessment purposes is a good one. This aligns with the idea that literacy should include behaviours that you can observe.

Listening and speaking attitude survey

• This learner self-assessment is quite long and set up for an academic situation. But it would be easy to cut it down to size and adapt to a workplace or other context.
• You can find this on pages 58- 61.
• There are ideas for follow-up discussions with learners as well.

Diagnostic listening assessment using recorded texts

• This diagnostic is involved and requires you to use the CD that comes with the book or the audio files.
• If you don’t have the CD you can download the full set of audio files here as well as the transcripts.
• You can find this on pages 62-75.
• There is a lot of detail here and you might not need it all. However, if you’re interested in designing listening assessments for your own contexts this may give you ideas.

Diagnostic speaking assessment observation

• This one relies on tutor observation and mapping the learner being observed against the relevant progressions for speaking.
• It’s very detailed, but you may find that you can take aspects of it and adapt to your own purposes.
• You can find this on pages 76-81.