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 iAOCPaQ03686; Wed, 24 Nov 2004 07:25:36 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 07:25:36 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <31F45B1A.341A0333.0004C68E@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:766] Re: The problem situation (reading 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: 3860 Lines: 17 Re numbers in numbers out etc.. The standards to which I directed people are used as the basic for creating statistics such as those referred to by Katrina. This happens in two main ways. First, 'outputs' are often measured in terms of the achievement of a 'qualification' or 'certificate' based on the standards. These are 'awarded' by one of a number of awarding bodies or examining boards. SUch bodies have to be nationally recognised, and are supposed to serve several purposes, including assuring the govt and the public that those to whom they issues certificates have really achieved the 'standard' in question. Some of them also claim to evaluate the quality of teaching and so on on the courses and programmes where the stuff is taught. Some of them are memebrship bodies, so if you want to sell a qualification, join an awarding body and get it to 'accredit' it. Accredit is a bit of a Janus term, since we have now started measuring out whole national curriculum vocational and academic in 'credits', a term which is ironic since it takes people half their lives to pay off the credit bills they have acquired with their degrees. So for 'accountability' purposes they do draw up lists of numbers recruited, retained and achievements. SInce not all adults want a 'qualiication' eg if you wanted to do flower arranging, then there are also mechanisms for recording achievement on what has now come to be called 'non accredited provision', a significant use of terminology which seems to have been started by the big organisations which are in favour of parcelling things up into 'credits'. It implies that 'accredited provision' is the norm. In respect of adult literacy, the bullet points seem to be the 'bits' which tutors on non accredited courses have to measure and provide evidence of achievement for audit. However, on non accredited provision, as you will recall my explaining, it is not the bullet points in the standards but the bullet points in the curriculum which are used, since tutors are trained to 'map' any bit of a performance to these bullet points, each of which has a code number indicating its level of difficulty, its linguistic focus (text, sentence, word_ etc. I am not certain whether the people who wrote the curriculum actually intended this to happen, but now we have rules that any worksheet or lesson plan has to have listed on it these code numbers, and there are even IT tests which will print out a list of code numbers after the learner has done the test so that literacy and maths teachers get told by the programme what to teach. Some companies also have sets of worksheets that go with their assessments. You can see all sorts of IT based assessments of writing (multiple choice mainly) and even of listening and of SPEAKING. To get down to these 'bits' you can and are often encouraged to apply behaviourist procedures such as needs analysis and task analysis, breaking down a particular task or job description into the '[bits' of literacy or numeracy that are required to do it. This looks very efficient. You don't waste time teaching what people already know (as your diagnostic tool has told you this) or what they do not need (your task analysis tells you this) and therefore your course is 'learner centred'. I think one reason that they decided to chop things up into bits is that some people did not want to be obliged to teach a broad literacy programme, so they had to have little bits that could be used on a mix and match basis. Further, the curriculum gives examples of how to teach to each of the 'bits' and even breaks each bit down further into more subdivisions. It is a classic example of a behaviourist approach to curriculum development and the classic criticisms could be applied to it. Fragmented learning experiences, lack of overview of the domain etc.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Dec 23 2004 - 09:46:24 EST