Return-Path: <nifl-assessment@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id iAL8RV110870; Sun, 21 Nov 2004 03:27:31 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2004 03:27:31 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <07A0C868.00A0A169.0004C68E@aol.com> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-assessment@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-assessment@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-assessment@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: HthKar@aol.com To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-assessment@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-ASSESSMENT:735] Re: more on reading & literacy X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 X-Mailer: Atlas Mailer 2.0 Status: O Content-Length: 2247 Lines: 14 Thanks for this very interesting reply. Here for George and anyone else, is a link to the guidance booklet about UK's adult literacy standards. I hope it will be allowed on the forum. I defy all readers of this to come up with a clear statement about what the authors of this document thought standards actually were. Pages 5 and 6 are masterpieces of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. I cannot understand how people who can produce material such as this...but no, that kind of remark is not generally 'popular'... http://www.qca.org.uk/qualifications/types/5302.html As you will see, we have two 'capabilities'. We cannot call literacy and numeracy 'skills' as these documents are intended to flesh out the contents of other documents which describe a set of 'key skills' standards for application of number and communication, so to avoid confusion between the key skills and basic skills standards the developers of the adult literacy standards decided to call adult literacy a 'capability'. I hope that is clear? In addition to the 'standards' (or perhaps comprising them, depending on which of the definitions of standards you take, there are components, which have a) the same stems for all levels and sub levels, and b) another bit which nobody seems to have remembered to think of a label for but which carries the meaning that is not the same for all levels and sub levels. Then we have descriptors of each component. These provide the detail to (SIC) the components and are 'level-specific, signalling progression'. These, according to the booklet, provide objective, unambiguous criteria 'at which' (SIC) level and capability can be assessed. This is incorrect grammatically, an error which I have argued elsewhere is significant as it reflects conceptual confusion between standards as criteria and standards as levels. I tend to get irritated when those who are empowered to tell me how to teach literacy make errors in their writing, but I am learning to ignore it. Experience, which is plentiful in this respect, helps. Here is one of the sets of descriptors, stems of components etc at Level 1. This is supposed to be roughly what the average 11 year old can do. http://www.qca.org.uk/ages14-19/downloads/adult_lit_level1.pdf
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Dec 23 2004 - 09:46:23 EST