Citizen Literacy Blog
John Casey, Diane Gardner

TETO: Test Early and Test Often!
The importance of user feedback in developing an adult literacy programme using modern technology.

Citizen Literacy is an adult literacy programme that uses integrated printed and digital resources to support tutors teaching adults how to read and write. Designing and creating such resources cannot be conducted in a feedback vacuum. The title of this blog is taken from the early days of user-centred feedback for the web and is more relevant than ever to those of us involved in using technology in education.

We have been working hard to meet the needs of low literacy adult learners and their tutors, by creating a structured, phonics-based programme which includes a focus on spelling, the alphabet and grammar. Along the way we have communicated constantly with learners, tutors, stakeholders, community partners and funders to ensure that what we are creating puts the learner at the centre of everything. Establishing a dialogical relationship with our learners has been paramount amongst these relationships as it has set a foundation in place where both parties have learned from one another via discussion and, of course, feedback.

Apart from using testing feedback in our technical development work we also recognise the fundamental importance of learner feedback as an integral part of the educational design of our free, learner web app with learners receiving immediate feedback on how they have fared in the different activities. This extraordinary feature has proved extremely popular with learners who were used to waiting for up to a week and sometimes longer to receive feedback from their tutors. The web app’s immediate feedback feature allows learners to progress much more quickly by offering them ownership of their input and helping them to support their face-to-face learning with more confidence.

Advice for Tutors to provide ongoing, informal feedback as well as the more formal, written feedback, as required in the programme’s Formative and Summative Assessments is embedded throughout Citizen Literacy and has proved to be popular, especially with new tutors whose focus can sometimes be on just getting to the end of the lesson.

In turn, asking for feedback on how we, as Citizen Literacy programme designers, are progressing from learners and their tutors can be a daunting process but we have found that learners are incredibly happy to be included in the future of our programme and take the approach of offering feedback seriously. Tutors too are keen to be included and we have held a number of sessions with diverse groups where the discussion has validated our work and also helped us see the issue of Adult Literacy from many different perspectives.

We are ‘heads down’ right now focussed on getting the digital and face-to-face resources out there for a waiting adult literacy community and the following, golden nuggets have helped us along the way:

Learner H who received her Learner Books through the post during the summer,

“I love my books. I take them to bed to read like normal folk do. When folk ask me what I was doing last night, I tell them that I was reading in bed. “

Tutor A

“Your resources are just what we have been waiting for. They are fab!”

The same tutor then came up with a really helpful suggestion for our online delivery.

As we head towards the public release of our printed resources, the free learner app and tutor platform we understand that our work will involve a constant cycle of getting feedback from the worldwide adult literacy community. In this way we aim to keep our programme fresh and relevant to the needs of learners and their tutors.

We are particularly excited about the functionality of our forthcoming tutor platform. This builds on our learner app to provide a straightforward way for tutors to communicate with learners and new digital tools to support tutors. To supply feedback from the community about the tutoring platform and our other resources we shall be conducting a series of webinars later this year. We will invite ELINET members to our first webinars – look out for our announcements!

John Casey
Project Manager Citizen Literacy
john.casey@citizenliteracy.com

Diane Gardner
Author and Subject Specialist Citizen Literacy
diane.gardner@citizenliteracy.com

Follow us on Twitter: @citizen_phonics; www.citizenliteracy.com