Guides & Toolkits

3 • Institute for Work & Health (IWH) Preface This guide has been developed through a research project titled "Addressing essential skills gaps among participants in an occupational health and safety training program: a pilot study." The project was funded by the Max Bell Foundation and the Research Opportunities Program of the Ontario Ministry of Labour. The project was a collaboration among the Institute for Work & Health (IWH), Blueprint ADE, Labourers' International Union of North America (LIUNA) Local 506 Training Centre, Infrastructure Health & Safety Association (IHSA), Social Research and Demonstration Corporation, SkillPlan, and experts in the design of essential skills curriculum. The project sought to determine whether the outcomes of an occupational health and safety (OHS) training program could be improved by modifying it to address gaps in essential skills (ES). In a prior feasibility study, we identified the hoisting and rigging program offered by LIUNA Local 506 (using curriculum developed by IHSA) as the best candidate for a pilot study. This occupation is high risk, and most of the trainee population has ES gaps. Through consultations with the training centre and a review of the existing curriculum, we identified document use and numeracy as the essential skills most important in the hoisting and rigging program. We worked with ES curriculum experts, the training centre and IHSA to develop a modified curriculum designed to improve those aspects of numeracy and document use that are related to the job of hoisting and rigging. Changes included: new text on how to use Ontario's Occupational Health and Safety Act and regulations as a reference document, new explanatory content for different types of calculations, and updated calculation examples that included substeps. We assigned some trainee groups to the regular curriculum and others to the modified one, and assessed learning outcomes for each, mainly through written tests. At the beginning of each training intake, we assessed the document use and numeracy skill levels of trainees. We also collected information about age, first language, languages spoken at home, educational attainment, experience in the industry, and experience in the hoisting and rigging occupation, and used these as control variables in the analysis.

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