[NLA] Evidence-based practice in Adult Literacy Education

[Thomas Sticht]

David asked, "Does our field have a literature of recommended practice
based on 'scientific evidence'? If you think so, please cite some
examples." Subsequently, Andrea posted a message saying that we should
be looking for the best way to teach adults to read. Later she amended
that to include taking the context of the adults’ lives into account
when deciding upon the best way to teach adults to read. 

Here is an account of how the team I directed during the Vietnam war
went about developing the Functional Literacy program which, because of
its scientific, evidence-based outcomes,  was subsequently used to
replace all adult literacy education programs at all U. S. Army training
camps in the U.S. 
Tom Sticht

Functional Context Education: 
An Evidenced-Based Approach for Adult Literacy Education

As part of our work, our  team looked at the existing Army adult
literacy programs designed by adult educators in the local school
districts and found that the programs used general materials like the
old SRA kits (many of you will remember these), and Josephine Bauer’s
Ready? Get Set! Go! Series. And they used the United States Armed Forces
Institute reading tests to measure pre and post program gains. This test
was actually the Metropolitan Reading Achievement Test for children with
a new USAFI cover on it. I still have a copy of one of the passages for
measuring reading comprehension that said "Many a great artist’s work is
produced from the inspiration of his own personal experience. It is said
that the opera, Der Fliegende Holander, which translated means The
Flying Dutchman, was inspired by a stormy voyage across the North Sea by
the composer, Richard Wagner, etc.
." And this was used with young men,
many from inner centers of cities where opera attendance was quite low,
who were  about to go to war and fight for their lives, to measure their
reading comprehension abilities! 

In short, the adult educators had not done hardly anything to take into
account that these young men were in the Army and had to read some
pretty complex technical manuals and that some of this reading was
critical because it taught you how to stay alive in the midst of battle.
Instead, they had just imported into the military classrooms the same
materials they used in civilian programs and set out to work for six
weeks, which is all the time the Army would give for adult literacy
education, and went about their teaching just as if these men would have
the next year or two to work their skills up from a 2nd or 3rd grade
level to the 7th  grade level, the minimum needed for reading and
working with  Army materials. 

Looking at this situation, our team decided that we needed to find out
what Army men had to read, get copies of key documents and manuals,
develop job-related reading task tests to find out how well men could
read their job materials in a pre-post test comparison, and develop a
six week curriculum that would teach reading using job-related materials
instead of the SRA Kits and other general teaching materials that the
adult educators were using. 

We did all this for six career fields, and found that the general
literacy programs had been making about 7 months improvement in general
reading and about 5 months gain on the job related-reading tests that we
built. But the job-related programs made as much or more gain in general
reading and four to five times the gain in job-related reading, such as
how to stop a sucking chest wound in your buddy to keep him alive until
the medics could reach him. 

In a separate, independent,  evaluation sponsored by the U. S.
Department of Education,  the American Institutes for Research, which I
understand are now working on the next National Assessment of Adult
Literacy, evaluated the FLIT program and declared it one of only 12
programs out of 1500 candidates from both K-12 and adult education to be
an exemplary program. 

Later our team implemented the new curriculum at all Army training posts
using local teachers and replicated the original program findings across
the nation, demonstrating that our R & D team teachers were not a
critical component contributing to the program’s outcomes. 

Some significant aspects of this for the scientific, evidence-based
emphasis that is now facing the adult literacy education field are that
(1) we took the context into account in determining how to teach
reading, (2) we used a treatment/comparison group method in developing
our experimental curriculum, (3) we developed assessment instruments
that measured whether students were learning what we were teaching, that
is, the job-related reading task tests, (4) we used the same general
literacy tests that the adult educators were using to measure
generalization beyond job-related literacy in the form of gains in
general literacy, (5) there was an external, independent evaluation of
the program, and (6) we replicated the program five times in other
locations in the U. S. using different teachers to demonstrate that it
was the curriculum and not the R & D team that made the improvements in
job-related reading occur. 

Importantly, this R &D took place within a context in which students did
not have many external worries to distract them. They had
transportation, food, housing, medical care, dental care, clothing, and
supervision for time management. By holding all these factors constant,
the impact of the curriculum was better demonstrated. These contextual
factors are not so easily controlled in most civilian adult literacy
programs. 

Later, the U. S. Navy and Air Force developed adult literacy programs
following the functional context approach. In 1987 colleagues and I
contributed to "a literature of recommended practice based on
'scientific evidence'" for adult literacy education and published
Cast-off Youth: Policy and Training Methods From the Military Experience
(Praeger) which reviews 50 years of R & D in the military in both
vocational and literacy programs and established the principles for
functional context education that were disseminated in 1987 sponsored by
the Ford Foundation. Later these principles were established as policy
by the National Workplace Literacy Program, they were used by Wider
Opportunities for Women in  their work with welfare mothers teaching
parenting and vocational skills, and they have been used in other
countries in developing workplace and family literacy programs.  

A workshop notebook on Functional Context Education is available online
at www.nald.ca  under full text documents searched by authors using s
for my last name.
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