Re: Essential Skills

A very high percentage of LBS Managers report a good-to-very good understanding of Essential Skills and purposeful incorporation of Essential Skills into regular LBS programming.

Developers of Essential Skills and Essential Skills Reports state that Essential Skills were never intended to measure academic proficiencies and should not be used to do so. That is not to say it is impossible to identify and measure gains in the Essential Skills of Reading Text, Document Use and Numeracy in an academic environment. Essential Skills are critical to overall success in many tasks that accompany and support the academic pathway and they are embedded in some aspects of academic course work. Tasks such as these require Essential Skills:

• Preparing for and navigating the PLAR for Mature Students Assessment Process
• Goal-setting, course selection and program management
• Scheduling, organizing and implementing work plans
• Management of personal finances including budgeting
• Course work related to employment, volunteer work and participation in the community.

Conclusions:

More research on Essential Skills is needed in order to construct a proper view of Essential Skills within an academic curriculum. What we can do in the meanwhile, however, is identify the core skills and key transition tasks associated with a smooth transition from one academic environment to another and identify the Essential Skills of Reading Text, Document Use and Numeracy within those particular tasks. While that sounds very much like the original purpose of the project, we should mention here that considerable time and effort was given to attempts to align Essential Skills with components of the academic curriculum, that is to say, academic skills and tasks and texts found in LBS Learning Outcomes, the Grade 9-10 Ontario Curriculum, the Ontario Literacy Course, and the PLAR for Mature Students assessment. The results were inconclusive but they raised some important issues that will no doubt be part of the next stage of development. Aside from core academic-based skills and tasks, other key tasks for successful transition from LBS to Credit include navigating new systems, locating information, managing time, organizing information, solving numeracy-related problems involving time and money and working with technology. Providing explicit instruction in these areas and measuring the inherent Essential Skills is consistent and compatible, we believe, with the Ministry’s desire to see programs’ assessing the success of learners in attaining the literacy, numeracy and essential skills required for transitions to specific destinations.