[NLA] Can research improve policy or practice?

[Thomas Sticht]

Research note							November 8, 2001

Tom Sticht

Can adult literacy research improve policy or practice?

I recently attended a couple of R & D planning meetings which got me
wondering if the 50 million or so dollars that the federally-funded
organizations that have responsibility for research (National Center for
Adult Literacy, National Center for Adult Learning and Literacy,
National Institute for Literacy, Division for Adult Education and
Literacy) have spent in the last 10-12 years have made much improvement
in either policy or practice. 

While all these organizations have been pursuing research and publishing
reports,  non-addressed issues have arisen that deal with major
consequences for the adult literacy education field. 

Scale of Need. Important  questions of the scale of need for adult
literacy education have arisen, with the National Center for Education
Statistics producing a report by the former director of the National
Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) saying that the NALS used the wrong methods
and that the scale of need is only half of what was earlier said.
Despite this, R & D organizations go on using the NALS data as though
they are valid indicators of adult’s literacy skills in the USA and
elsewhere. There is also a huge gap between the numbers of adults
sampled on the NALS who thought they had a reading problem, some 95
percent thought they did not, and the reports of literacy problems
derived from the NALS standardized tests. This would seem to pose a
major problem in recruitment and increasing participation in adult
literacy education. If people don’t think they have a literacy problem,
why should they seek literacy education as a solution? We need some
solid research about how many adults need basic skills instruction and
how many want it. I haven’t found any research institute expressing
concern about this or doing anything to educate the field about all
this. But perhaps I am just not aware of what R & D centers are doing
about this and someone will inform me. 

Access and Participation. U. S. Department of Education officials report
that enrollments in the Adult Education and Literacy System of the
United States plummeted from over 4 million in 1997 to around 2.9
million in 2000. This is a drop of over 25 percent,  but I haven’t found
any research institutes expressing concern about this, even though all
of the federally funded R & D organizations  (NCAL;NCSALL; NIFL;DAEL)
have had participation and retention as one of their major interests. 

Nature of Provision.  To my knowledge no R & D center has stated concern
about the proliferation of non-validated ideas about literacy practice
and "reform" expressed in reports from  government funded organizations,
including the R & D centers themselves. A variety of reports from these
organizations tell teachers that they and their students can benefit
from the new knowledge contained in the reports. Yet they offer very
little, if any, concrete, convincing  evidence that some
teaching/learning problems are solved or improved by anyone who
possesses the knowledge given in the numerous reports.  

Accountability.  Numerous issues regarding the National Reporting System
and its encouragement of the use of standardized tests that almost all
in the R & D field acknowledge are inadequate measures of adult learning
in adult literacy education programs have been raised in various
refereed journals, literacy newsletters,   and internet lists, including
the NLA  list.  Yet  R & D institutes have had hardly a word to say
about this, though NCSALL published a report by Juliet Merrifield that
raised a number of issues that I have not seen addressed yet by NCSALL
or any other federal adult research organization. But perhaps the
National Academy of Science committee formed recently by DAEL will
address many of these issues. 

Another aspect of accountability is the need for data regarding the
returns to investments in adult education and literacy development in
many areas. I give numerous speeches advocating for adult literacy
education in different nations each year and I repeatedly hear about the
need for ROI information.  Can adult education produce better health
care for adults and their children and produce savings in medical costs?
Does it produce savings in early childhood, compensatory education
costs, does it produce savings in training costs in business and
industry? Does it produce returns in increased productivity at work? It
is very difficult to find "hard" evidence to argue for support for the
AELS, yet there does not seem to be much such evidence being sought in
the R & D centers for adult education and literacy research that would
permit strong ROI arguments for advocating for increasing funds for
adult education and literacy development. 

Finally, in the meetings to plan future research agendas for adult
literacy and family literacy education that I recently attended I did
not hear much to lead me to suppose that the next decade will bring much
more by way of R & D that can actually improve policy or practice. For
one thing, there was no actual policy or practice problems or issues
that were identified as existing in some real place or in some real
policy that needed research to inform its change. Instead of considering
real problems of policy or practice in some real contexts, the R & D was
placed in a decontextualized frame and discussed not as problems but
rather as academic topics that need to be researched to "fill in the
gaps" in "our" knowledge, as though there are such metaphorical "gaps"
which "we" can just "plug" with a little R & D.  

The advantage of the topic approach to R & D is that it permits endless
theses and dissertations by graduate students in academic institutions
because as is well known, there is no end to the exploration of a topic.
Unfortunately, in my experience, there is also a very small track record
for such topic-oriented  R & D to solve genuine practical problems in
adult literacy education in some real place and real time (or any other
problems of education, witness the billions of dollars spent on K-12 R &
D over the last quarter century and the present state of education). 

Over the years I have been a strong advocate for R & D in adult literacy
education. But right now, the lack of any major responses to the
national problems I’ve mentioned above, and the lack of any evidence of
effectiveness in solving important adult literacy education problems in
various R & D reports I have recently seen from federally sponsored and
supported research and dissemination organizations make me very
concerned that if things continue in the future as they have in the
past, the field will not find much benefit from another decade of R & D
in adult literacy education.  

But perhaps I am overly pessimistic. Perhaps readers will respond with
numerous insights into how R & D has solved very practical policy and
practice problems for them and they have some data, some convincing
evidence,  to substantiate such claims. I hope so.