Literacy Basics - Community Literacy of Ontario

b) It’s consistent with LBS principles and practice
Outcomes-based program evaluation is a natural extension of how we work with individual learners in literacy agencies. We focus on learning outcomes – the results of what students learn. Learning outcomes focus on how people apply their learning as opposed to what an instructor or a tutor covers in a curriculum. Similarly, evaluation outcomes are more concerned with the program’s impact on individual learners (both collectively and individually) than on how that program is delivered and what is taught. Program outcomes are the actual, measurable changes that our students experience as a result of our interactions with them. For example, they may be able to do their banking independently whereas in the past they relied on a family member. Or they might be accepted into a college course when earlier they had failed the entrance test. Literacy students experience many wonderful successes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to document that a high percentage of learners had successfully met goals?

Now that Ontario literacy programs are comfortable and experienced with working with learning outcomes, it shouldn’t be a huge leap to think in terms of outcomes for program evaluation. There is a natural connection – in both situations, we are focusing on people and our impact on those people. It truly is a learner-centred approach! Just as keeping a learner’s training plan and learning outcomes in mind helps keep us learner-centred, keeping overall program outcomes in mind reminds us of our overall focus and mission. For example, if your agency’s mandate is to help learners prepare for further education and training, then it would be reasonable to evaluate how many of them did indeed pass entrance tests and were prepared for the next level of education. On the other hand, evaluating how many learners found employment would not be a reasonable outcome for your agency if that was not the intent of the programming you delivered.

You may recall that the Literacy and Basic Skills section has been working towards the implementation of a Continuous Improvement Performance Management System, or CIPMS. This approach focuses on three core measures: efficiency, effectieness and customer satisfaction. CIPMS “makes it possible for LBS-funded agencies to achieve a high quality of standard of service for diverse communities and learners while maintaining consistency across the system.” (Source: MTCU Letter of November 23, 2005).

As part of this commitment, the Ministry hired Vubiz Ltd. to conduct research and provide advice on the topic of measuring learner skill achievement. This research began in the spring of 2005 and is still in progress at the time of writing. The intent of the research is to assist LBS agencies and MTCU to more effectively measure, document and report learner successes which means that there is a good possibility the findings could be used for outcomes-based program evaluation.

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