How do I design contextualised literacy and numeracy assessments for my learners?
Next up, you need to design and use some contextualised literacy and numeracy assessments with your learners.
If you remember back to the end of your last assessment for this course, we asked you to start thinking about specific learning outcomes for embedding literacy and numeracy.
You’ll get a chance to revisit these learning outcomes here and in Collection 6. In this part of the course, you need to decide on a focus for your contextualised assessments. You should use your learning outcomes from the last assessment to help you do that.
Just be aware that if your thinking has changed about what you want to focus on with your learners, you’ll need to adjust your learning outcomes to match.
You can take any direction you want with these learning outcomes and the focus of your embedded literacy and numeracy. However, we want to offer some guidelines and working examples over the pages that follow.
You don’t have to use our examples, but feel free to experiment with or modify them if they’re useful. You will have to adapt them to your own context.
Before we get into the guidelines and examples, let’s just join some dots. Your specific learning outcomes for literacy and numeracy should provide the focus for
- Your contextualised diagnostics that you’re about to start working on;
- The teaching activities that will follow (Collection 6); and
- How you assess learner progress afterwards (Collection 7).
In other words, your embedded literacy and numeracy learning outcomes drive both your teaching and the kinds of pre and post assessments you need to use with your learners.
We’ll refer to them here as pre-assessments or diagnostics, but you should be able to reuse these as post-assessments in your work later in the course.
What are some guidelines for designing my own contextualised literacy and numeracy assessments?
You can take whatever direction you want from here. You should be guided by your experience, your analysis and mapping of demands from Assessment 3, and information you get from your other diagnostic tools and processes.
As well as that, here are some guidelines for designing your own contextualised literacy and numeracy assessments based on what has worked successfully for other tutors in our experience:
Look at examples
This includes examples of generic literacy and numeracy assessments and examples of already contextualised literacy and numeracy assessments from other contexts. You can contextualise the generic ones and re-contextualise the others to your subject matter.
We’ll provide some examples in the next few pages. Some of these are in the Learning Progressions resources. Others were created by tutors.
Narrow your focus for literacy down to just vocabulary
If you’re only going to pick one thing because of limited time and resources, you should probably pick vocab. It’s woven through all the four strands for literacy and everything else hinges on it.
You’ll need to work out what the essential vocabulary really is. And whether this includes academic or technical jargon. But vocabulary is the best bang for your buck when it comes to literacy. We’ll show you how to do this shortly.
Narrow your focus for numeracy down to just measurement or a single relevant aspect of Number
If you work in trades, you probably already know the specific areas where your learners struggle with numeracy. Often this is related to using units, tools and calculations for some kind of measurement.
If you’re not in trades, then here are the things that everyone struggles with: fractions, decimals, percentages, place value, basic facts. These are all part of Number.
If you are an ESOL teacher, you may wish to focus on location which includes things like giving and following instructions for movement involving distance and direction. We’ll show you some examples as we move through the next part of this course.
