The respondents also expressed the need to develop wholistic assessment tools that assess more than the 3Rs:

Most tools do not acknowledge other skills-oral skills, emotional/spiritual intelligence-that also impact on the development of reading and writing skills.

To develop a tool to complement the academic assessment and to assess social/emotional life competencies, so programming could be developed to ensure greater success in the academic program.

Very hard to measure the affective domain of learning. This area of learning can be transformative-so how do we as assessors and practitioners measure this?

Educators want tools that encompass and measure literacy practices, rather than just literacy skills; and social/emotional competencies, rather than just academic outcomes.

In my jurisdiction we need to agree on an assessment tool we can all use that measures skill level as well as considering non-measurable outcomes.

Within the sphere of adult basic education in Canada, agreement has not been reached about the notion of competence. Some stakeholders view student competence in adult basic education programs as progress in reading, writing, and numeracy, while others view learning through a broad-angle lens and advocate for wholistic learning. Educators realize that students need more than the 3Rs to gain access into the workplace and to participate in society. Educators are also cognizant of the mismatch between the learning outcomes or performance measures endorsed by the governments and the aspirations of the students.

Research, as well as practice, supports the notion of wholistic learning and assessment (Battell, 2001; Grieve, 2003; Horsman, 1999, Johnny, 2004; Silver, Klyne & Simard 2003). However, educators and policy-makers continue to struggle with ways to measure wholistic learning; we need to figure out ways to count what really counts.

If the government invests funding into the development of a set of tools that are culturally relevant, wholistic, and customized for populations with specific learning needs, do they need to be referenced to a set of levels and benchmarks? If so, which set? The next section discusses these questions.