[AAACE-NLA] UDL, DI, & Adult Literacy Education

[tsticht at znet.com]

October 23, 2008

Universal Design for Learning, Differentiated Instruction, and Workplace
Literacy

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

Workplace literacy education can involve a wide range of abilities among
adult learners. In designing a literacy program it is important to
incorporate a number of teaching tactics and strategies that can address
these individual differences. This is the primary idea behind Universal
Design for Learning (UDL), which emphasizes the use of various technologies
to provide alternative learning materials/methods for different learners, 
and Differentiated Instruction (DI), which emphasizes the use of
alternative teaching methods/materials for individuals within a classroom
or other learning contexts.

A search of literature on adult literacy education has revealed little
research on the use of UDL or DI in adult basic education (ABE), with a
particular dearth of research that would meet standards of experimental
research as called for by the U. S. Department of Education’s Institute of
Education Sciences. To address this lack, I will describe R & D which I
directed some forty years ago that involved aspects of UNL and DI, though
the work was not referred to in these terms when originally conducted.

Listening as a Substitute for Reading

During the Vietnam war I was asked to conduct research on the possibility of
teaching low literate soldiers using listening instead of reading. I had
been doing research on “reading by listening” with blind students and it
seemed likely that some of that research could be used in designing
research with poorly reading, sighted soldiers.

In conducting job analyses to find out how listening and reading skills were
used on the job, my team found that less literate soldiers were more likely
to access information by listening than by reading, and the tendency to
rely more on reading increased as reading ability increased. In laboratory
studies, we found that teaching job-related knowledge first by listening
transferred to improve reading comprehension of job materials. These
studies suggested the use of listening as a substitute for reading in a
literacy course using audio recordings and playback technologies. This is
consistent with contemporary ideas from UDL. It also lead to the design of
instruction in which learners worked in peer teams of two or three and
orally discussed vocabulary words from job materials, in a practice
consistent with ideas from DI.

Reading Skills of Personnel

One of the things we discovered in studying the reading skills of personnel
was that higher ability readers were much better than low ability reader
sin identifying  words, sentences, and paragraphs when they were typed
running together without any punctuation, spaces or other cues to their
beginning or end. Furthermore, the weakest readers who could decode words
fairly well had a great deal of trouble comprehending sentences and larger
segments of texts such as paragraphs. So in designing our literacy program
we incorporated training in the use of a simple grammar for parsing and
comprehending sentences and this was used with those learners having
problems with comprehension at the sentence level. This is consistent with
the ideas of DI that are in contemporary use in some ABE classrooms.

Literacy and Graphics Technology

In examining the types of literacy materials personnel used job training and
on the job we found a number of different types of materials such as tables
(matrices), pictures, flow charts for troubleshooting and following
procedural directions and others. We therefore incorporated different types
of instruction using these types of representations of information for
helping learners comprehend paragraph and longer text materials. We taught
personnel to read a 300 word passage on the four life saving steps and to
then draw a picture of what they were reading. Next, we asked them to flow
chart the material. With these multiple transformations of the information
from text-base, to pictographic, to flow charts the learners mastered
paragraph and longer text materials. We also had some materials that were
read and used to construct tables (matrices) with rows and columns for
sorting information in complex passages into organized categories in the
matrix. This use of graphic organizers is consistent with both UDL and DI
ideas.

Self-Paced Instruction

In addition to the foregoing instructional techniques, we also incorporated
DI in the form of a strand of curriculum that was self-paced so learners
could proceed at their own rate of learning.

Evaluation of the literacy program included a quasi-experimental design in
which the job-related program was compared to the existing general literacy
programs that the Army provided. We found that the experimental program
produced as much or more improvements on a general reading test as the
comparison program made, and we made three to five times the gain in
job-related reading as made by the general literacy programs. The
experimental program was then implemented in all Army training programs
across the nation with similar results, indicating that the effectiveness
was not limited to our R & D team. Finally, an external evaluation by the
American Institutes for Research reported that the program was effective
and exemplary.

Need for More Research

The foregoing research is the only work I have found in adult literacy
education that incorporates aspects of UDL, DI, and follows a
quasi-experimental research method and includes replication across the
nation and an external evaluation. Clearly there is a need for further
research on these various instructional methods in adult literacy contexts
beyond the military workplace literacy program reported here.

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