If there is a gap between your learners’ likely capabilities and your course or vocational demands, then you need to develop some literacy and/or numeracy learning goals for your learners and plan how to support them to attain those goals.
For example:
The report below indicates that the numeracy capabilities for the majority of the learners in the group are below step 5. This means that most of these students do not have a good understanding of fractional or decimal number concepts and will struggle to understand concepts like percentages or rates. They may be able to find an answer using a formula, but will not be able to gauge the reasonableness of the answers.
Suppose this group of learners is enrolled in a Hospitality or Cookery course where they’ll be expected to scale recipes up or down, make drinks or dishes where ingredients are expressed as ratios, calculate the cost of dishes, change quantities measured in grams to kilograms and volumes measured in millilitres to litres. All of these tasks map to step 5 or 6 on the numeracy progressions.
If your learners are to do tasks competently and confidently they will need your support to build their understanding of decimal numbers and proportions.
You may decide that a necessary numeracy learning goal is that learners can convert common percentages (eg., 10%, 25%, 50%, 33%, 75%...) to their fractional equivalent and find the percentage of a value using division strategies. For example learners calculate 25% of $800 by finding a quarter of 800.
You can find teaching and learning activities, ideas, and resources to help you plan your teaching in the Learning Progression resource booklets.
By analysing the information in the Group Summary reports from the Assessment Tool using the Learner Profiles and the more detailed Learning Progression descriptions, you can start to ‘Know your Learners’.
Now you need to compare your group’s likely capabilities with the literacy and numeracy demands of your course. Once you’ve identified the gaps between your learners’ abilities and the course demands, you can plan ‘what to do’.
