Philanthropists and policymakers sometimes opt to fund childhood education to "stop illiteracy at the source" at the expense of funding for adult literacy education. In 2000, "The New York Times" published an article about a gift of $100 million being given to schools in Mississippi to promote the teaching of reading to…

Project REALISTIC, sponsored by the Department of the Army under contract with the Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO), was designed to determine functional literacy levels for selected military jobs having civilian counterparts. (MM)

Looks at the increasing rate of illiteracy in developing countries and the role of family literacy programs in combating the trend. Describes family literacy programs as different from traditional literacy programs in that they are designed to maximize the probability that adults will succeed in transferring their new beliefs, attitudes,…

Examines the construct and action validity of the use of simple checklists to assess the declarative knowledge component of adult's literacy by telephone. Finds significant relationships among knowledge when assessed either by listening (telephone) or by reading (mailed questionnaire) modality. Concludes that the telephone method may provide a…

Describes how the military fights against illiteracy, suggesting military methods are useful in teaching young adult civilians. Highlights: the origins of functional context education in the military; work toward literacy in the Vietnam war era; applications to teaching civilians; and the K-12 education system. Functional context education can…

Recently, several industrialized nations have engaged in extensive and expensive assessments of adult literacy using door-to-door surveys and tests of "functional" reading. A study examined the use of simple checklists of author's names, magazine titles, famous people's names, and vocabulary works used earlier by West, Stanovich and Miller (1993)…

Reviews evidence regarding the content, standards, and use validity of the International Adult Literacy Survey's performance scales and self-assessment scales. Concludes that there are serious questions about the performance scales and that self-assessment data may help identify adults who believe they have poor literacy skills. Suggests that…

Describes the FORECAST readability formula for adults working with job materials, which was developed in the early 1970s. Suggests that it is a better measure of who wants and needs basic skills than the International Adult Literacy Survey. (JOW)

The FORCAST readability index was developed and cross validated on technical job reading materials and job candidates. Several structural properties of passages were related to passage readability defined as the lowest measured reading grade level at which half the readers met a standard cloze criterion on the passage. The simple, single variable…

Human cognitive system and information processing theories were used as the theoretical base that frames an interpretation of adult literacy research from World War I (WWI) through 1993. These theoretical perspectives are as follows: (1) literacy learning is grounded in a distinct developmental sequence; and (2) literacy learning is dependent on…

The use of readability formulae to estimate the difficulty levels of vocational reading materials, the determination of relationships of reading skills to job proficiency, and the relationship of general reading ability to performance on specially constructed job reading task tests (JRTT) are discussed to define the literacy skill demands (i.e.,…

In the United States and many other nations, adult literacy students are marginalized. To serve the educational needs of these adults, governments have established an educational system that is marginalized among education systems. In California, the adult literacy education system is marginalized in the following ways: it is a noncredit system…

The field of cognitive science (as represented, for instance, by intergenerational literacy programs) offers new ways to think about increasing cognitive abilities, which is particularly important in view of the disappointing outcomes of many intervention programs that do not seem to make their participants more knowledgeable or better thinkers.…

This paper reviews research which indicates that (1) more adults spend more time at job related reading than at any other type of reading; (2) materials written for functional purposes (job manuals, newspapers) are often too difficult for the people who are supposed to read them; (3) secondary English courses focus more on teaching reading and…

This report describes the development of a Literacy Assessment Battery (LAB) for determining the relative efficiency with which adults can comprehend language by reading or listening. Development of the LAB included: the tryout with adults of two listening and reading tests designed for children; experimental studies of a decoding task involving…