ABSTRACT

Literacy is a complex set of skills that comprise the inter-related processes of reading and writing required within range of social and cultural contexts. The term 'assessment' is used in many different contexts for a variety of purposes in educational settings, including individual and group, standardised and informal, formative and summative. Formative assessment can also be preventative and pave the way for early identification, particularly for children who are at risk of dyslexia. Comprehensive assessment and evaluation seeks to accurately identify a student's patterns of strengths and needs. Curriculum-based assessment involves the collection of repeated short samples of a student's behaviour within one or more curriculum areas. Special Needs Assessment Profile (SNAP) is a computer-aided diagnostic assessment and profiling package that makes it possible to map each student's own mix of problems on to an overall matrix of learning, behavioural and other difficulties.