[AAACE-NLA] FCE: Wisdom and Evidence Based

[Thomas Sticht]

Functional Context Education: 					                        January 29, 2005
An Evidence-Based Approach to Adult Literacy Education
Integrating Professional Wisdom With Scientific Evidence

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

In 2002, Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, Director of the Institute of
Education Sciences, defined evidence-based education as: "the integration
of professional wisdom with the best available empirical evidence in
making decisions about how to deliver instruction." He went on to define
professional wisdom as  "the judgment that individuals acquire through
experience" and "consensus views." He noted that "Increased professional
wisdom is reflected  in numerous ways, including the effective
identification and incorporation of local circumstances into instruction."

Functional Context Education is an approach to adult literacy education
that had it beginnings in professional wisdom of teachers of adult
literacy and later acquired an empirical base of research that has
validated and extended the professional knowledge of teachers. Following
is a brief outline of this transition of Functional Context Education from
being based solely on professional wisdom to being based more on empirical
research.

A Basic Tenet of Functional Context Education: The approach to teaching
adults to become literate should be based on the life circumstances of
adults, not children.

Origins:

1861-1870 The education of freedmen during reconstruction following the
Civil War. The teachers developed special materials that tried to reflect
the post-slavery circumstances and aspirations of both children and
adults. Though aspects of the materials reflected a middle-class
conception of how freed slaves should live, the attempt was made to make
the materials relevant to the current life circumstances of freedmen
rather than impart a typical childhood education in reading and writing
using the primers of the schools.

1911 Cora Wilson Stewart started the Moonlight Schools of Kentucky and
explicitly stated that one should not teach adults as though they were
children. She developed functional materials for teaching reading,
writing, and math in the contexts of  health, family care, farming,
banking, citizenship, etc. for adults.

1917 World War I soldiers were taught reading, writing, and math using
materials that incorporated aspects of camp life and military
circumstances to make it easier for the men to related their experiential
knowledge to the new knowledge they were to gain from book reading.

1943 World War II soldiers were taught reading, writing, and math using
military contexts and two fictional characters, Private Pete and his buddy
Daffy to help men relate to literacy learning during war time. Testing was
introduced to measure learning progress, which was found to occur.

Late 1940’s Frank Laubach created materials for teaching reading in India
which incorporated adult themes and concerns such as health and
citizenship.

1960’s Paulo Freire developed methods for teaching reading in the
functional contexts of adult’s lives and lead them to critical
consciousness about their life circumstances and how they might go about
changing their situations.

All the foregoing were based on professional wisdom without the benefit of
much by way of what would be considered empirical research.

Late 1960’s into 1970’s Army’s Functional Literacy (FLIT) R & D program
was first research program that introduced systematic methods for studying
literacy practices of personnel in various jobs and job training programs,
incorporated these practices into the design of job-related literacy
programs, and compared the effectiveness of general literacy programs to
job-related programs and found that the latter produced as much
improvement in general literacy but three to five times the improvements
in job-related literacy, which was what the programs were supposed to do.
The FLIT program was not only based on the professional wisdom of earlier
adult literacy educators it also incorporated concepts from cognitive
science in formulating the practices of "reading to do" versus "reading to
learn" based on research in psychology on a human cognitive system with
various memory systems, and it incorporated both direct instruction based
on behavioral principles of systematic instruction, pre-and post-testing
of learning, and progression based on mastery, and instruction of a
constructivist nature based on an extensive review of linguistic, computer
science (e.g., artificial intelligence), developmental psychology, and
experimental studies of reading. The program was externally and
independently evaluated by the American Institutes for Research and
implemented in several states indicting that the methods were
generalizable beyond the R & D site.

1970’s – Present. Various research projects in cognitive science
reinforced the ideas making up Functional Context Education principles
that were based on professional wisdom at the turn of the 20th century.
The principles were officially formulated in 1987 in a book entitled
Cast-off Youth: Policy and Training Methods From the Military Experience.
Research by Victoria Purcell-Gates and colleagues at NCSALL in the late
1990s confirmed the principle of transfer formulated in FCE  and found
that  programs that used materials from the lives that adults live outside
the classroom were more likely to stimulate the transfer of literacy from
the classroom to the "real world" of the adults. Numerous projects in
India and other nations have confirmed that making materials relevant to
the lives of adults promotes greater participation and retention in
programs than do academic oriented programs. Recent research in the 2000s
using pre and post tests indicates that integrating basic literacy
instruction with health knowledge development can produce gains in both
general literacy and health literacy.

The foregoing, although an incomplete and informal compilation of a wider
base of research relevant to Functional Context Education,  illustrates
the accumulation of educational knowledge about the teaching of adult
literacy based on professional wisdom and scientific research over a
period of more than a century.

This body of knowledge has produced at its most generally applicable level
a series of principles, not particular materials or techniques, that can
guide the development of adult  literacy programs. To transform these
research-based principles back into sound adult literacy education
requires solid professional knowledge, skill, and, yes, wisdom. The cycle
of knowledge generation then begins again.

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
2062 Valley View Blvd.
El Cajon, CA 92019-2059
Tel/fax: (619) 444-9133
Email: tsticht at aznet.net