V Recommendations

A. Recommendations relating to practice

This project recommends that:

1. Ontario adult literacy programs value, document and incorporate learners' perspectives on progress in assessments.

• Learners' perspectives on progress should be documented in a way that gives them parity with results documented from any other on-going assessment tool.
• Recognize and value non-academic indicators of progress in order to ensure a more complete picture of learners' progress.
• Document relationships between different kinds of progress so that these relationships become more visible to the learner and to the practitioner.
• When documenting learners' perspectives on progress, recognize that their learning outcomes are not simply acquired skills (i.e., "I was able to read better"), but rather contextualized applications embedded in social practices (i.e., "I was able to read the pamphlet in the doctors' office") that need to be documented as such.
• Create more opportunities for learners to discuss reflectively how they are doing on an ongoing basis. Literacy learning outcomes can be rich and interconnected. For learners, the process of reflecting on and discussing their learning outcomes can:
  
  
  1. Help them identify, understand and appreciate the full set of outcomes they have achieved as a result of their literacy program participation.
  2. Help learners set future goals. Greater self-awareness and insight into what they have achieved can help them set future goals that build on their achievements.
  
  

2. Ontario adult literacy programs examine how they currently document real-life practices and non-academic indicators of progress and investigate other strategies, techniques or models that already exist which facilitate the description, documentation and validation of learners' perspectives on progress.

• Programs may already have informal or formal processes (conversations or forms) that ask for learners' perspectives on progress. Document and incorporate these processes as evidence of progress in formal on-going assessment practices.
• Trial and reflect on the proposed documentation tool offered in this project.
• Consider other tools and approaches for documenting learning perspectives on progress. There are numerous models/tools which can help, for examples those found in Naming the Magic: Non-Academic Outcomes in Basic Literacy (2001), Learning Journey metaphor approach (2002), Building Self-Awareness and Self- Direction model from Supporting Learning, Supporting Change (2003).