[NLA] Evidence-based practice in Adult Literacy Education

[Catherine B. King]

Tom Sticht gives us a wonderful anecdote about educational
practices where what he calls the "principles for functional 
context" were used to streamline and develop a focus on
reading and training for a specified purpose--in this case,
the military getting ready to go to war.

While I haven't looked at his accompanying website yet, I do 
like the sound of "principles for functional context."  And 
perhaps the teachers who were running the literacy program 
before his group stepped in overlooked the highly specialized 
needs as well as the high motivation these military people had, 
or their complete abstraction from distractions they were 
afforded--and the learning specifics that these oversights
inferred.  

If I understand the general notion of the "principles for functional 
context," unlike the above anecdote (used to prove an important
point), most adult education programs deal with a huge variety 
of functional contexts, in vastly different and varying time frames, 
and with clients from varying cultures, all of which are couched 
in the larger context of educating adults as citizens in a 
democracy--whew.   

As a principle, and if I understand it correctly, the actual 
"functional context" is a recurring variable which, under this 
principle, will help, if not totally, define the operations and 
consequent assessments criteria of the program--also
variable.  There is only one step to asking the client what 
they want to learn and if they want to join a discussion on 
some local political issue which will ultimately affect their 
lives instead of automatically administering a reading 
intake.   

The multiple-methods we have been speaking of complement
quite well the comprehensive and varied functional contexts we 
deal with at the level of program development and intake 
assessment.  The point is, a combination of methods would 
underpin a more emergent and client-specific and client-
directed program.     

It seems to me also that, in addition to developing new and
more comprehensive program functions, the development
and use of more comprehensive methods allow us to 

(1)  methodically bring into view assessments of our 
programs in broader lights than mere numerics can afford
and that would include the clients' judgments;

(2) the development and use of other methods will allow our 
adults and teachers the latitude to help define and match 
program functions to emerging or changing needs; 

(3) the development and use of other methods will allow,
and even invite, our adults and teachers the latitude to
move towards self-education in ever-broadening circles
of interests (as in "lifelong learning"); 

(4) and the development and use of defined and varied
methods systematically leaves adults and teachers in a
position to assess the assessors and the policy makers.    

In (4) above, the true test (assessment) of our assessors
is if their assessments have been precluded by and are
developed from their having set up the prior conditions to 
open the door for adults to raise critical questions about 
themselves, their teachers, the programs and the policies 
that determine what is in them and how they are run.

Again, I doubt anyone here is against evidence-based
policy formation or science as the development of critical 
judgment.  However, the questions "What constitutes
evidence?" and "What is scientific for humans and for
education of us/them?" must break the bonds of the 
limited and even demeaning parameters of natural 
science data and merely numerics--because the 
data under consideration are human beings.  Therefore,
the methods used and, consequently, the criterion of
assessment, must be attuned to human development 
in the broader ethico-social-political and collaborative
context--if we are not to continue corrupting education as 
such through our adult education programs and through
our own DOE.    

If George's quotes don't alarm us, what will the next
wake-up call look like?  They are saying our own 
professional collaboration has no merit, but "scientists'" 
of their choosing do?  We are engaging theory and
questioning its parameters--that makes us scientists
and philosophers--which is exactly what teachers ought
to be.  And we are engaging in self-critique, which is
apparently not what is going on at the "higher" levels?

I don't know about you, but the language that George 
has uncovered is downright scary to me.    Gadamer 
was talking in another way about the rise of the 
techno-fascist?   Perhaps that's what we are witnessing?
Where else but in education would a good fascist begin?

Regards,

Catherine King
  


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Thomas Sticht <tsticht at aznet.net>
To: <nla at lists.literacytent.org>
Cc: <tsticht at aznet.net>
Sent: Saturday, April 06, 2002 8:37 AM
Subject: [NLA] Evidence-based practice in Adult Literacy Education


> 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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