Academic Literacies

Academic literacies are the prerequisite skills, background knowledge, understandings, and proficiencies students need to engage in new learning. When teachers think about “pre-assessment of learning” they are typically thinking about academic literacies.

Teachers may use authentic examples, formal or informal classroom assessments, observation, or other demonstrations of student’s subject-specific knowledge and skills; and how science, math, social studies or English language arts are important in student’s culture/ethnicity and in the home and community. Teachers should identify areas in which academic literacies correspond to formal achievement data and/or raises inconsistencies with formal achievement data. 

Academic literacies may connect to national, state, or district standards (i.e. Common Core Standards). Analysis focuses on patterns of student errors, skills, and understandings to analyze student learning in relation to the target academic literacies while isolating concepts that are mastered or that will require extra support for the whole class, sub groups and individuals.

In Elementary Literacy, look for skills, background knowledge, and proficiencies in areas such as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, writing, standard English conventions, oral language, and motor skills and handwriting.  

In Math, look for skills, background knowledge, and proficiencies in areas such as number sense, mathematical reasoning, mathematical calculation, and fluency in mathematical computation.

For instance, if you are about to teach a science unit on streams, what prior academic skills, knowledge, and understanding will students need to activate during instruction in order to access and develop new skills, knowledge and understanding? Perhaps they will need to have the following:

• • An understanding of the scientific method

  • Grade level reading ability in order to access the text

  • Knowledge of some science related vocabulary you discussed in a prior session

  • Writing skills if you plan to have them write up a lab report

If you proceed with instruction with the assumption that students have all of these academic literacies because they have been covered before, then you are likely to have significant groups of students who struggle.

Differentiation rests on the assumption that you as a teacher have good information about your students skills and gaps in these areas, and that you can therefore either adapt your plans or provide additional support to gaps of students.

An example of effectively characterizing a student's prior-academic literacy:

• You are about to teach a unit that is writing intensive. You are starting with certain assumptions about students prior writing skills that you will be building on in that unit. In order to differentiate, you need to look at students prior demonstrations of writing to determine which students have the prior academic literacy needed, and which students will need support in the target skills area.

• Teacher may pre-assess as follows: “Joanne demonstrated the ability to make a clear, arguable claim at the developing level on the prior end of unit assessment based on the common core writing rubric, will need targeted support in writing.” 

An example of misapplying the concept of prior-academic literacy:

• You are about to teach a unit that is writing intensive. You look at the students prior report card and determine "Joanne earned a C in English last year, she is likely to struggle with writing." This type of analysis may tell you something about the students overall school performance, but does not provide evidence of their proficiency in specific academic literacies.