Willfred Greyling
View comments from Willfred Greyling, Literacy Embedding Manager at Waikato Institute of Technology (WINTEC), taken at the Symposium in Hamilton, July 2011.
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Key content
Incorporating the Adult Literacy and Numeracy Assessment Tool into tertiary teaching systems
Transcript
So from a diagnostic angle, I think the ALNAT is crucial to New Zealand, crucial to learners, because if we want to develop skills we need to start with where the learning is. If we are able to indentify where the learning is, that’s the first stepping-stone, that’s a starting point. And it should be a steeping stone into other practices that follow on the tool. I mean, just using a tool – identifying, diagnosing students' needs – is not enough. One has to get constructive alignment across one’s activities. The next step is deliberate acts of teaching in lecture halls and in workshops, wherever students are then exposed to training. So there has to be those deliberate acts of teaching – without deliberate acts of teaching, the tool will have lost its value. That’s the one gain; the other gain for the system is a baseline. Learners want to know where they are, where they are at on the scale. If they know that they are step two they know that they can set a target. That is why we have personal learning plans. Personal learning plans follow on the results, so we identify the next step that they have to achieve so that they can show that gain and they can actually become motivated by the gain. So knowing where you are at as a starting point is good because then you can define that target. And learners define that target when they find it interesting when they have gained, and they are very concerned if they haven’t gained.
The literacy and numeracy assessment tool comes at the beginning. And what happens next? – it is finding out how it is integrated into all your systems.