What is the Assessment Tool?

The Literacy and Numeracy for Adults Assessment Tool (the Assessment Tool) is primarily designed to help Educators to identify the strengths and weaknesses of Learners' literacy and numeracy skills. This will help Educators develop programmes for Learners that match their needs and strengthen their literacy and numeracy skills. The Assessment Tool will also allow Learners to track their progress over time and enable Educators and organisations to report on the progress made by Groups of Learners.

The vision for the Adult Literacy and Numeracy Assessment Tool is to build an online, adaptive, innovative, robust and flexible tool with international standing.

Of course, no definition of this sort would be complete without giving some idea of what the Assessment Tool is not.

The Assessment Tool is not a Learning Management System (LMS)

An LMS provides the ability to create different assessments for all sorts of different circumstances. Examples, such as Moodle or SumTotal, vary in their approach, but essentially they try to cater for a wide range of audiences and situations, and their function is one of providing training or facilitating learning in their users. The Assessment Tool does not attempt to teach or instruct Learners. Rather, it is a specialised tool for the assessment of the Learner's ability, including strengths and weaknesses, that can be used as an input into the teaching or instruction process.

The Assessment Tool is not a Student Management System (SMS)

In general, an SMS is a specialised piece of software that assists in the day-to-day running of an educational institution. Its functionality relates mainly to enrolment, courses, student details and qualifications. In contrast, the Assessment Tool is designed only to concern itself with a very particular aspect of the Learner's ability - that of assessing literacy and numeracy. The intention, if you use a SMS, is that the SMS should always be the "master" repository of Learner information.

In both the case of an LMS and an SMS, there may be an opportunity to streamline processes whereby Learners are loaded into the Assessment Tool and their results are re-imported into other systems. If you are the administrator for an LMS or SMS at your institution, you might be particularly interested in the sections on Importing Learner data from a file and Data Engine Extract of a Learner's Assessment results.