Once we had gathered or created the materials, the next step was to examine them to determine the embedded literacy and basic skills. For each demonstration activity we asked the following set of questions:
This step may seem somewhat out of place in light of suggestions from other sources, such as the Ontario Literacy Coalition’s Designing Down, Assessing Up (2001). These resources recommend that practitioners first identify the gap that exists between a specific learner’s current skills and the skills that s/he will need to achieve the short-term goal.
In the case of this project, however, the objective was to create more generic demonstrations: demonstrations that would reflect the needs of any apprenticeship candidate who is functioning at a given LBS level. This difference meant that we would have to include an extra step in designing the demonstration activities: identifying the prior learning that would need to take place in order for a learner to successfully complete the task. This will be discussed further in the Designing the Demonstrations section of this report.
Once we understood the requirements of each demonstration, it was time
to start designing the demonstrations themselves.
For each of the ten demonstrations (one for each of the five LBS levels in two apprenticeships), we followed best practice for development. We chose to model the demonstrations after the sample demonstrations posted on the Demonstrations Ontario web site, and to use the resources provided in the Quality Toolkit section of the site. These resources are:
We felt that by using these tools, we would create demonstrations that are consistent with best practices in assessment, and that were valid evidence of learner progress in improving literacy and basic skills. We also felt that using a familiar and consistent format would benefit practitioners throughout Ontario who were familiar with the model demonstrations located at the Demonstrations Ontario web site. When designing the demonstrations, we used the following steps.