Diploma and degree completion have become the fundamental standard for judging the performance of secondary and postsecondary educational institutions. Increasingly, leaders of education and workforce policy and programs assume that these measures of attainment effectively serve as indicators of adequate levels of essential literacy and numeracy…

A substantial proportion of participants in public adult education programs struggle with "basic" academic print literacy skills. According to the 2014-2015 National Reporting System (NRS) data, 48.7% of the national adult basic education/adult secondary education (ABE/ ASE) population tested as reading at or below the "Low…

Millions of adults in the United States lack the necessary literacy skills for most living wage jobs. For students from adult learning classes, we used a lexical decision task to measure their knowledge of words and we used a decision-making model (Ratcliff's, 1978, diffusion model) to abstract the mechanisms underlying their performance from…

For the growing group of adult migrants, flexible solutions for second language (L2) acquisition are increasingly important, while concerns about the efficacy of online language learning abound. This study on the L2 situation in Flanders has 4 key aims: analyzing adult learner profiles in fully online Dutch beginners' courses; comparing learner…

This study examined whether the spelling abilities of adults with low literacy skills could be predicted by their phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness. Sixty Adult Basic Education (ABE) students completed several literacy tasks. It was predicted that scores on phonological and orthographic tasks would explain variance in…

The following insights into the reading skills of 312 participants in adult basic and secondary education programs are based on a principal components analysis of reading components' contributions to variance in reading comprehension. Overall, 75% of variance was explained by four composite variables representing word skills, language…

This dissertation utilized a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental design to investigate the impact of parent development on rising third graders' summer reading losses as measured by the difference in May and August oral reading fluency scores. Title I parents and students from three schools in a rural North Carolina school district participated in a…

The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is a cyclical, large scale study of adult skills and life experience focusing on education and employment that was developed and organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In the United States, the study was conducted in 2011-12 with a…

The present study examined data from a large, nationally representative sample--the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NCES, 2007)--to examine how computer use and Internet-based literacy practices (use of e-mail, searching for information on the Internet, and Internet chatting) were related to prose, document, and quantitative literacy…

Findings from an evaluation of a workplace literacy program funded by the State of Indiana are presented. Working with employers, providers were given considerable latitude to design their own training regimens. The state awarded certificates to workers who achieved certain levels of proficiency in reading, math, critical thinking, problem solving…

CASAS, in cooperation with the CASAS National Consortium Policy Council, conducted a study to provide guidance to program and instructional staff regarding student readiness to take the GED Tests. The study looked at the relationship of CASAS reading and math scores to official 2002 GED test results from five states--California, Hawaii, Iowa,…

The 2012 edition of the "Digest of Education Statistics" is the 48th in a series of publications initiated in 1962. The "Digest" has been issued annually except for combined editions for the years 1977-78, 1983-84, and 1985-86. Its primary purpose is to provide a compilation of statistical information covering the broad field…

The 2011 edition of the "Digest of Education Statistics" is the 47th in a series of publications initiated in 1962. The "Digest" has been issued annually except for combined editions for the years 1977-78, 1983-84, and 1985-86. Its primary purpose is to provide a compilation of statistical information covering the broad field…