This report outlines literacy and numeracy gains achieved at the Waikato Institute of Technology for the period 2015-2017. It extends similar analyses conducted for the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) in 2015 (Greyling, 2015a, b, c, d, and e). Given the challenges in analyzing and tracking learner progress in the Literacy and Numeracy Assessment Tool (LNAT) outlined in the 2015 reports, we report on literacy progress goals for reading and numeracy following the current LNAT Gain Calculation algorithm. In the Literacy and Numeracy Implementation Strategy (2015-2019), the goal is stated that by the end of 2019, the sector would be required to have achieved statistically significant progress for 25% of targeted L1 to L3 learners who, on initial assessment, achieved reading step scores of ≤ 3 and numeracy step scores of ≤ 4. In this report, we apply the algorithm to show in Appendix S that it yields modest if not misleading results. We argue that
• If 69.4% of learners (n=1574) were at step 3 for reading (Appendix A, Table 1) and 57.4% of learners (n=1296) at step 4 for numeracy (Appendix A, Table 2) on initial assessment, the likelihood of reporting significant LN progress for the targeted learners at these higher levels was much lower than for learners at the lower end of the distribution.
• at higher levels of difficulty on the scale, it is far more difficult to achieve statistically significant gain.
• the algorithm masks LN success, especially where targeted learners were able to achieve exemption-level steps deemed by TEC to place them in the low risk-of-failure category.
• cross-tabulations represent a far more realistic mode of reflecting on LN progress, especially if we report on learners who achieved the threshold levels of exemption.
• cross-tabulations also allow us to identify the proportions of students who have achieved gains of two or more steps, or who regressed.
• reading and numeracy gains that see learners achieve the exemption levels for reading and numeracy are statistically and educationally significant.
We recommend that the results reported for the institute, centres and programmes be taken as baselines for setting targets for LN progress. These baselines may be cross-validated against earlier results for the institute (Greyling, 2017; and 2015a, b, c, d and e).