Introduction: Looking Back, Starting Again

Loren McGrail
Editor
SABES Central Resource Center / World Education

Looking Back

Because of the ongoing nature of this process--learners learning at various rate, and with varying degrees of speed and abilities our attempts to reflect upon progress at the end of the cycle are really part of a larger circular process of learning we never really finish. (Janet Isserlis, p.l0)

Looking-back assessments are done at the end of a cycle. They can, as Janet Isserlis states above, be a process of learning about learning for teacher and student alike. In general, they serve five main purposes:

• to indicate the levels of proficiency learners have attained in language and literacy;
• to indicate if learner goals, needs, and interests have been met;
• to document changes that have occurred in learners' lives both inside and outside the classroom;
• to provide evidence of a program's success; and.to provide assessment data that has been aggregated across components, summarized, and made comprehensible to an audience external to a program (performance review).

Depending upon its philosophy, focus, and approach to language and literacy, a program may focus on any or all of the above objectives. Programs that aspire to a more participatory form of assessment will involve learners during both the development of the assessment strategy and during its implementation. The following is a list of strategies or procedures programs in this volume have used to meet some of these objectives:

Student self-evaluation in which learners use surveys, checklists or narratives to show changes that have occurred in their goals, interests, and needs for literacy (Isserlis, Reddy);

Reviewing documentation of classroom observations (teacher logs) to summarize progress (Isserlis);

Class Evaluations in which groups of learners provide feedback on the class, discussing what they liked and didn't like (Cason, Reddy); and

Program evaluations in which students from various classes come together to discuss programmatic issues like class time, grouping, and child care (Reddy, Cason).

There are a two other procedures not refered to by the authors in this journal which are worth mentioning:

Peer interviews in which students ask each other questions they have generated individually or collectively, and

Student/teacher conferences in which questions which have been asked at intake are reviewed for changes in literacy practice, literacy strategies, meta-cognitive awareness, increased range of literacy materials, support systems used or the support provided to others.

There are many reasons why these strategies and looking back assessment strategies in general have not been developed or implemented as fully as initial assessments or ongoing assessments. The biggest reason is time, a precious commodity for the majority of programs operat- ing with mostly part-time staff on a shoe string budget which barely covers prep time not to mention time to evaluate learners holistically. However, I believe there is another reason, one which is even more basic. All of us—administrators, counselors, teachers, and students—find it difficult to talk about literacy and language development beyond talking about skills. We are all new to thinking about learning as a process and not just a product. What Isserlis claims is true for many learners-that they have Can innate sense of their own language move- ment but the expression/verbalization of that progress may not be within the frameworks they have developed or use in describing learning"-is probably true for practitioners as well. We are just at the beginning of developing our own framework and don't always know how to translate our thoughts, hunches, and ideas about what constitutes progress into practice, tools, and procedures that measure and document what we believe to be real indicators of growth and change.

Starting Again

As Ann Cason writes in this volume (p. 14), the all-program evaluation is "a tool thatt while helping us to look backt is really just a beginning.- What we count as progress or success at the end of a cycle should have been noted or collected as data at the beginning of a cycle.

Which aspects of language and literacy should be addressed by a program depends on which elements the program wants to emphasize. There are a number of indicators for literacy success that programs might focus on. In generalt they can be categorized as evidence of progress related to language and literacy development and evidence of program success in non-linguistic domains. (Wrigley, p. 139)

When developing start-up or intake activi- tiest some of the linguistic and non-linguistic indicators of success to look for include:

• getting a sense of what learnerst needs and goals are;
• finding out how learners use literacy in their lives inside and outside the classroom (in their community or at the workplace);
• understanding what literacy means to learners or how learners judge their own capabilities;
• finding out how learners go about making sense of printt what strategies they do or do not use; and
• documenting what learners can do with literacy.

The activities and tools used to document the kinds of progress listed above include:

Informal Interviews (Schmitt, et at; Jackson, et al)

Goal-setting Activities (Gluckman, et al; Schmitt, et at)

Reading Samples (Jackson, et al)

Writing Samples (Jackson, et al, Gluckman, et al)

Language/Literacy Inventories (Gluckman, et al)

Focus Groups (Jackson, et at)

Of all these strategies, the language/literacy inventory is the most difficult to develop and implement, yet it may be the procedure that gives both learner and teacher the most concrete evidence or "base-line data" on how a learner uses language and literacy in his or her everyday life. It is the one tool that may help us understand how what we do in the classroom manifests itself outside the classroom in the family, the community, or the workplace.

As teachers begin to think about their assessment experiments, they sometimes go through a process of self-reflection. This kind of reflection may be disquieting, but I believe it is essential to teacher research. Amy Gluckman describes it best when she says that her work in assessment "...has probably forced me to acknowledge that I don't believe as completely in a student-centered approach as I might have thought. There are some things that I want my students to learn and some goals that I want them to have whatever they think about it." (p. *) Gluckman is reminding us that there is not always a clear relationship between the needs of the students and the goals of the program and that, in fact, they can even be at odds with each other. However, a participatory approach to assessment, like a participatory curriculum process must start with valuing what learners want and need literacy for. Starting with learners' goals, needs, and interests does not mean programs have to abdicate their own goals. It is a process of negotiation. What has been missing in most traditional forms of learner assessment is even asking the question.

Re-assessing assessment, putting into practice a more participatory approach, challenges learners and teachers at their most basic level. That's the way it should be.

Also see "Learner Assessment in Adult ESL Literacy"
Heide Spruck Wrigley, 1992

Loren McGrail
Editor

Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 3 (April 1992),
SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 2003.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.