The purpose of this research was to develop an understanding of the shared lived experiences of women with ACEs who dropped out of high school, later returning to adult literacy programs to receive remedial education to prepare for and complete GED requirements, and explored the barriers they had to overcome to do so. The following research…

Each year in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people enroll in adult basic education (ABE) classes but leave before completing a level or accomplishing their goals. The persistence of this phenomenon may indicate that it is a feature of the system, rather than an unforeseen outcome. Research on other types of social service provision…

This report makes the case for a shift in emphasis in U.S. education and workforce development policy. Specifically, the report sets out a rationale for investing more in upgrading the foundational skill levels of the U.S. workforce. The report summarizes the results of studies that used data from the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey…

The purpose of this qualitative, ethnographic case study was to compare the experiences of stakeholders connected to adult high schools and adult literacy programs in Manitoba, Canada. This is an important study, because it gathered information about providing educational services to adults who have dropped out of school. The researcher used…

Social science research often uses educational qualification as a signifier for characteristics such as abilities, earnings potential, and civic participation in adulthood. This study focused on two types of adult literacy students who were native speakers of English and identified words at the 3rd to 5th grade levels but differed in one key…

Initiated by a "Pilot workshop on developing capacity for establishing lifelong learning systems in UNESCO Member States" held at the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, the purpose of this study was to develop a Lifelong Learning system in Ethiopia. Preparations for its conceptualisation included the review of relevant national…

Professor Stephen Reder presented the Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning (LSAL) at The Centre's 2011 Fall Institute--IALS: Its Meaning and Impact for Policy and Practice--whose findings had implications far beyond assessment. Based on evidence from the ten-year study of more than a thousand adult high school drop-outs, Dr. Reder challenges many…

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conducted the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), a multi-domain adult skills assessment with an extensive background questionnaire, in 2012. PIAAC is a global effort to understand how individuals' education, workplace experiences, and other…

Drop-out from upper secondary school is considered a widespread problem, closely connected with youth unemployment. The aim of the current study was to examine whether parents' level of education predicted drop-out for 16-24-year-olds when accounting for basic skills. For this purpose, data from the Norwegian (n = 996) and American (n = 641)…

While a long tradition of sociocultural literacy research suggests that out-of-school youth engage in a range of meaningful literacy practices, we know little about how programs for returning students foster or constrain students' literate identities. Drawing on data from a qualitative study conducted in a community college-based program for…

In 2003, a study of two Canadian adult literacy programs included 37 learners who revealed a variety of reasons for having dropped out of school as teenagers and younger adults. Chief among these were the influences of parents, siblings, and peers both in and out of school. This article considers these research findings, in light of the…

A two-year evaluation of the Advancing Young Adult Learning (AYAL) project was conducted. AYAL is a professional development process for teachers working with 16- to 24-year-old students preparing for their General Educational Development Test (GED). It combines Youth Cultural Competency (YCC), Project-Based Learning (PBL), and strengths-based…

The 2019 edition of the "Digest of Education Statistics" is the 55th in a series of publications initiated in 1962. The purpose of the "Digest" is to provide a compilation of statistical information covering the broad field of American education from prekindergarten through graduate school. It contains data on a variety of…

The learning difficulties of 23 adults were investigated in order to determine ways to better serve their literacy needs. These adults were all living in poverty, had less than eighth-grade literacy levels, and had failed to graduate from high school. The participants' records were examined and structured interviews were conducted with them; also,…

The 11th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2018) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Templeton Landing in Buffalo, New York. This year's EDM conference was highly competitive, with 145 long and short paper submissions. Of these, 23 were accepted as full papers and 37…