DEVELOPING THE TRANSITION PATHS

It was critical to identify what adult learners need to know and be able to do in order to help them make a successful transition to their next steps. The knowledge and skills they require depend on what demands are placed on them in their roles as students, workers, and family and community members. For students whose goal is further education or training, demands include meeting specific credentials or pre-requisites required for entry to credit, postsecondary or apprenticeship programming. For learners whose goal is employment, demands include developing the knowledge and strategies they need to find and maintain employment. For learners whose goal is personal independence, demands include developing skills that will help them perform tasks independently at home or in the community, i.e., skills that will help them improve the quality of their lives.

As mentioned, the notion of learner transition is not new to LBS/AU deliverers. In college Academic Upgrading programs, for example, math courses are specifically tailored to learners’ most popular postsecondary destinations such as Business or Technology. Because LBS/AU programs are learner-centred and goal-directed, learners’ short-term and long-term goals are always taken into account. The framework initiative, however, afforded team members a special opportunity to conduct a more intense and systematic examination of next-steps expectations to discover the core skills and tasks that were needed for successful transition.

A number of options for gathering this information were available to the team. Because of time pressure, team members developed their research approaches separately. Collaboration would have provided a more consistent approach to data collection.

Appendix G provides a brief overview of the research conducted for each transition path contributed by Project Team members. This research is critical in establishing the validity of the framework. If learners are to be tested for gains in Essential Skills, the research must demonstrate that Essential Skills are viable for each path. If they are viable, the overlap of Essential Skills must be determined. This is important for two reasons. First of all, learners cross pathways and therefore need to be familiar with Essential Skills. In this phase of the initiative, we have focused our efforts on exploring each path. During the next phase, we need to examine where the main cross points are for learners. Secondly, the degree of overlap of Essential Skills with each path impacts on skills gains, i.e., a greater overlapping should result in greater Essential Skills gains. In other words, skill gains will vary by path. This is significant and from a fair assessment perspective, it means that skills gains cannot be compared across paths. It would not be fair, for example, to compare the gains of learners in the employment path with the gains of learners in the secondary school credit path. Determining the degree of overlap between the Essential Skills and each path is a priority for the ongoing development of the framework and one that will require intense, ongoing discussion, especially for the paths with an academic focus.