LITERACY Bench marking

Background

In his address to the inaugural Council Meeting on 27^th October 2004, Mayor Garry Moore said   "Let me turn now to the matter of a Sustainable Community. This is something we do well. I consider that an early task for our city to adopt is to accept the sort of target which has been set by the Mayor's Taskforce for Jobs that one of our society goals must be that everybody in our city under 25 is doing something. This means that all of our young people will either be in work, or, in training.

To our young people I'd also like to guarantee that in this city they will get to certain levels of literacy and numeracy."

The first is the Mayor's Task Force and the second is LANE - Literacy and Numeracy Project.  This has been going on for 3 years now and as part of it we need to be able to draw a line in the sand and say that anyone who does not measure up will receive help.  To do this we must have benchmarks for Literacy and Numeracy.

Benchmarking Project

A study-literature review was done to find evidence to justify using a fluency test which could be used to benchmark the state of Christchurch citizens in reading.

The objective of the project was to find evidence that oral reading fluency tests could be used to benchmark(norms) the levels of Christchurch people in reading.

School districts in the United States have developed "local norms by collecting data on their own students' oral reading fluency  performance (Anastasi, 1988; Elliott & Bretzing, 1980; Kamphaus & Lozano, 1984).

The standard oral reading fluency tests consists of students reading a passage of text for a period of one minute.