A study was undertaken during 1982-83 to determine the number of lesson-hours it took to raise the reading level one grade of students (16 years of age and older) enrolled in Project: LEARN, a nonprofit Cleveland program that provides free reading and writing lessons to older youth and adults reading at third-grade level and below. Among them are immigrants learning English as a second language (25 percent of enrollees) and inmates at local correctional facilities. Volunteer tutors are recruited and trained, and the core material used is The Laubach Way to Reading. Of 181 students in the sample, 59 percent were black, 71 percent were male, 70 percent were unemployed or laid off, 31 percent were married, and 57 percent were under 35 years of age. The Adult Basic Learning Exam (ABLE) was used as a pretest and a posttest, with posttests occurring after 50 hours of lessons and 100 hours of lessons. The increase from the pretest to the first posttest was about one grade level. The second posttest showed an additional one-half grade-level gain. The posttest scores correlated more highly with the number of lessons completed than they did with the number of days in the program. Since the study, the project has stopped using the ABLE and started using the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT). (CML)