As literacy practitioners we have always addressed outcomes that extend beyond reading writing and numeracy, ones that include a wide range of non-academic outcomes. Reflecting on our findings however, we realized that sometimes our perceptions of learners' progress differ from how they perceived their progress and its impact on their lives.
Our research told us that there are many other indicators of progress that assessors cannot observe but that only the learner can know and report. Furthermore, some learners expressed progress in an area of their lives and placed importance on a specific indicator of progress that we had not considered. For example, one learner talked about feeling comfortable talking with someone different from himself. To him, this was an indicator of progress resulting from his work in a numeracy group. The importance learners placed on progress in terms of what they could now do has implications for how we recognize learning.
We realized our assumptions about what constitutes progress influences our choice of assessment tools and consequently impacts assessment results. We thought about how we often value progress that a learner can demonstrate in an assessment process over progress that the learner himself observes in his life. Assessment results can be an important factor in on-going learner goal-setting, motivation and morale, tutor instruction and decisions about continuation in a literacy program and movement to other programs. If the purpose of assessment is to document learning, assessment results are incomplete when the learners' perspectives are not considered.
For these reasons, we believe that learners' perspectives should.have value in adult literacy programs and therefore be included in assessment practices. There are many reasons to integrate learners' perspectives into assessment practices.