research

Addressing Adult Literacy Can “Create a Legacy of Inter-Generational Achievement”

/ The Old Crank

A New Zealand Literacy group is citing research from Australia, of all places, as further evidence that “addressing adult literacy needs has the potential to create a legacy of inter-generational achievement.”

Research published last week in Australia on the effects of positive parental engagement on children’s learning has serious and urgent implications for New Zealand. Literacy Aotearoa is calling for the government to recognise that adult literacy issues affect not just the current generation of adults, but also the educational performance of their children. (my emphasis)

The study, ‘Parental engagement in learning and schooling: Lessons from research,’ which was commissioned by the Australian Family-School and Community Partnerships Bureau, notes that parental engagement has a positive impact on many indicators of student achievement. These include higher grades and test scores, enrolment in higher level programmes and advanced classes, higher successful completion of classes, lower drop-out rates, higher graduation rates, and a greater likelihood of commencing postsecondary education.

The study references academic research, using economic modelling to examine the impact of parental engagement. The research showed that parental effort has a large effect on student achievement, compared with school resources such as per pupil spending on teaching. That effort improved students’ academic outcomes to levels equivalent to those of students whose parents had received an additional four to six years of education.

The study also references a 2003 report into community and family influences on the education of New Zealand children prepared by the Ministry of Education.

“There are three lessons New Zealand can learn from this research conducted by our near neighbour,” says Te Tumuaki (Chief Executive) of Literacy Aotearoa, Bronwyn Yates. “The first is to confirm just how important parental engagement is. The second is to note the implications for children whose parents, despite their desire to see their children succeed educationally, are less able to positively engage in assisting them because of their own difficulties with literacy, language and numeracy. The third is to recognise the opportunity offered by this pre-Christmas report for government and communities to take urgent steps to address the high literacy needs of adult New Zealanders, as a genuinely change-making investment in families for generations to come.” (my emphasis)

Preteen Girls With Low Literacy More Likely to Become Pregnant as Teens

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

A new study provides more evidence that investments in literacy pay off in ways that aren’t directly concerned with job training or career prep.

Released this week at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, a University of Pennsylvania study suggests that independent of other factors, preteen girls with below average literacy are more likely to get pregnant as teenagers.

The researchers examined the reading scores of 12,339 girls with an average age of about 12 years, together with the birth records among those girls from 1996 to 2002. Girls who had below-average reading skills were 2.5 times more likely to have a child in their teen years than those with average reading skills.

Healthline reported some interesting comments made by the researchers during their presentation:

“This study underscores the importance of investing early in programs to improve literacy across the board, said Dr. Rosemary Frasso, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania and APHA presenter, in an interview with Healthline. “The potential reduction in teenage childbearing is one of the many positive payoffs here.”

Frasso points out that because African American and Latina girls were found to have lower literacy levels, literacy programs may particularly help prevent unwanted teenage pregnancies in those groups. “Education success and better literacy in young children is protective for preventing teenage childbearing, particularly for Latina and African American girls.” (my emphasis)

Frasso went on to say that  increasing collaboration between educators and healthcare providers would be “a good idea.” Specifically, according to the Healthline post, doctors should help preteen patients connect with literacy programs.

There’s more about this research from Science Daily and Public Health Newswire. The study itself is scheduled to be published in the February 2013 issue of Contraception.

This research illustrates the why, from a public policy perspective, it is a mistake to link investments in literacy for youth and adults so rigidly to job skill outcomes. This could lead to a narrowing of the public’s perception of the role that literacy has on other critical social issues, such as health, nutrition, pre-natal care, safety, and community engagement (just to name a few)—and limit opportunities for literacy programs to collaborate on efforts to address them. It’s critically important that public officials, foundations, and other private funders are shown how investments in literacy can positively impact their efforts to address a wide variety of issues.

New Community College Completion Study Emphasizes Student Perspectives – Will Adult Education Policymakers Join the Trend?

/ The Old Crank

Education Week’s College Bound Blog reported today on a new report published by Public Agenda, WestEd and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success Initiative that looks at barriers to college completion, called Completion by Design Student Voices on the Higher Education Pathway. The researchers gathered the bulk of their data for this report via focus groups with community college students themselves. The students’ responses are worth reading (in particular, from an adult education perspective, it was interesting to read that “most students believed that the student success and developmental education courses intended to bring them up to speed were not offered in a way that helped them succeed”), but it was also interesting to me to learn that, apparently, soliciting student views on the issue in the first place is unusual—and that doing so might be an emerging trend:

Policymakers are realizing that listening to students may be part of the answer to improving educational attainment. Other initiatives have focused on high school student voices and attitudes of students about paying for the cost of college.

Could this trend one day work its way into a prominent place in adult education research? In 2009, in testimony provided to what was then called the House Committee on Education and Labor’s Higher Education, Lifelong Learning, and Competitiveness Subcommittee, Mary Finsterbusch, Executive Director of VALUE, a national nonprofit organization governed and operated by current and former adult literacy students, argued that the perspectives of adult literacy and basic education students are often overlooked:

One of VALUE’s core beliefs is that most successful for-profit companies rely on consumer input and feedback to improve their products and services; the adult literacy system should do this too. Adult learners should be part of the planning, delivery, and supervision of adult education services and research at every level. As recipients of adult education services, adult learners have a unique, important, and all-too-often overlooked perspective regarding what does and does not work.

The consumer, the adult learner, isn’t asked for input or feedback about adult literacy policies and programs in any systematic way. Low-literate adults are sometimes viewed as ignorant – at best, people to be pitied and taken care of; at worst, people to be looked down on and dismissed.

On May 29th I was invited to attend a briefing on a new National Research Council (NRC) report,  Improving Adult Literacy Instruction: Options for Practice. This report essentially distills and summarizes the latest research (or, in some cases, the lack of sufficient research) that informs (or should inform) adult literacy teaching practices. There were several hundreds attendees at the briefing asking questions and providing feedback; by my count, there was just one person there who self-identified as an adult learner—Marty Finsterbusch.

Report Identifies Benefits of Literacy Instruction for the Unemployed

/ The Old Crank

According to The Irish Times, a study in Ireland has found that unemployed people with literacy and numeracy problems who receive targeted training are almost three times more likely to move out of unemployment within a year than other unemployed people receiving the same training.

The Times reports that previously there has been no research on the experiences of unemployed people in Ireland with literacy and/or numeracy problems.