NZITO Information for Assessors

Benefits of ELN

Why is ELN Important? A 2008 Adult Literacy and Life Skills survey found that 43% of New Zealanders lacked the literacy and/or numeracy skills to fully participate in work The Government has identified literacy and numeracy as a key factor that requires improvement For employers there are clear benefits in having a workforce with good literacy and numeracy skills as they are more productive, safe and engaged in their work All ITOs are required to embed literacy and/or numeracy in level 1 & 2 qualifications from 2013 and have a requirement to begin this at level 1 in 2012

What does that look like? Almost half of New Zealanders lack the literacy and/or numeracy skills to effectively participate in the workforce. Reducing the % of people in the red sector increases New Zealand’s productivity and provides a better future for all new Zealander's % of NZers who require literacy and/or numeracy support

How does the company benefit? Employees will…. - have a better understanding of written and verbal work instructions - have greater engagement in their work - make fewer mistakes - understand compliance requirements - behave more safely But most importantly…. employees with good literacy and numeracy skills are enabled to contribute more to their work.

What is involved? Trainees are required to complete two assessments, one at the beginning and one towards the end of their training programme Embedded literacy and/or numeracy exercises are included in new training workbooks provided by NZITO The workbooks take an integrated approach which will save time for assessors through reducing over- assessment and paperwork These workbooks have been designed to be unobtrusive and contain materials that incorporate good design principles

What About Assessing? Assessment practice will continue as normal NZITO will provide you with workbooks for the (V7) Meat Intro training and assessment The workbooks have been written to include key elements of ELN principles which has the effect of making the workbooks easier to read and understand Each workbook covers a set of unit standards Workbook one includes all the compulsory units for the qualification plus some elective units These are available to all assessors free of charge

Workbook One Workbook one has been written with ease of assessment in mind As many of the units have cross over evidence requirements the workbook has been written so that evidence is required only once Therefore the employee who is working through the book may not realize he/she is completing a number of unit standards at one time Assessment time will also be reduced

Workbook Two Workbook two will cover the on-job units and therefore will be shorter than workbook one It has been written with the same ELN principles embedded Evidence that is common across a number of units will be assessed once Workbook two will be available in approximately one month

Your Part in the ELN Process

What You Need to Know About ELN? As an assessor you will need to have an overview of the ELN assessment process You maybe the person at your site who manages the ELN assessment process or it maybe the duty of another staff member It is important to understand where you fit into the process and you will need to discuss this with your employer or customer if you operate externally Please take the time to familiarize yourself with the process by reading the next set of slides

What Should the Employees Know? Your role as an assessor is to ensure that the employees have a positive experience with the ELN process The employees need to know and understand that the ELN assessment is there to measure the effectiveness of the embedded literacy within the training and not to assess the individual The ELN assessment results are held by TEC and are used to measure literacy gain from the start of the programme to the end In this way the government can understand better the effect of ELN in work based training Therefore the employee needs to complete the assessments to the best of his/her ability

The ELN Assessment Process

Assessing Literacy & Numeracy (1) Learners are required to complete two assessments using the Tertiary Education Commission’s literacy and numeracy assessment tool. ELN assessments take a maximum of 45 minutes to complete. One of these assessments is required at the beginning of the training (pre-assessment) and the other is towards the end of the training (post assessment). Assessments can either be done online or on paper. Sites will need to decide whether they want their trainees assessed on literacy or numeracy. Learner details are only needed for the first assessment. After that their details will be retained in the system.

Assessing Literacy & Numeracy (2) The assessments are done to measure the effectiveness of the embedded training, and not to assess the individual It is important that trainees know that they will be assessed twice (at the beginning and towards the end) Employees should be assured that their results will be kept confidential and are stored on the Governments database (not NZITOs) The timeline below shows the points when trainees need to be assessed for either reading or numeracy

Assessing Literacy & Numeracy (3) Refer to the flowcharts on the following pages for an outline of how the assessment process works. If you have an urgent request to setup trainees for assessment – please but also phone the training support team and advise them of the For urgent situations assessments can be setup in as little as 3 hours. You will need to enter learner details onto the spreadsheet provided which we can use to bulk upload trainee details to setup their assessments for the pre-assessment

Bulk upload template Below is a sample of the bulk upload template that will be provided in excel format. Up to 200 trainees can be setup on this form Use a fresh form for each new group The yellow cells indicate where information is required. If you don’t know the trainee’s NSN number we will check for this and set one up when needed.

ELN pre-assessment flowchart

ELN post-assessment flowchart

Online assessments (1) If online assessments have been selected go to this website: Or you can find a link to the literacy and numeracy assessment tool on the NZITO website via the following link:

Online assessments (2) Once a learner has their code and they go to the website, all they need to do is enter their code in the field below