Measuring Situated Literacy Activity

Abstract

This report presents the results of the development of a methodological approach to provide empirical evidence that family literacy programs “work.” The assessment techniques were developed within the action research project Literacy for Life (LFL) that the authors designed and delivered for 12 months, working collaboratively with three different cohorts of immigrant and refugee families in western Canada. The goal was to develop valid and reliable measures and analyses to measure the impact on literacy skill and knowledge in a particular version of a literacy program that incorporated real-world literacy activities into instruction for low-English-literate adults and their prekindergarten children, ages 3 to 5. The authors offer this approach to assessment as a promising way to measure the impact of socially situated literacy activity that requires taking the social context of literacy activity into account. They offer this work not as the answer to the challenge of documenting the value of working with families and literacy, but as one way to think about focusing curriculum and assessment within programs that validate the real lives of the participants and build bridges between those lives and literacy work within family literacy programming.