Adult literacy is a pressing policy issue in Canada. Reports reveal immigrant communities as accounting for a relatively large share of the country's population experiencing low reading, writing, numeracy, and information processing skills. This paper explores how Black immigrant women who are adult literacy learners negotiate and reconfigure…

Uses the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series to examine literacy or educational attainment of African American migrants from the South to northern cities, 1880-1990. Consistent with migration theory, Black migrants had significantly higher levels of education than southern Black nonmigrants and lower levels than northern-born Blacks. Both…

As part of an ongoing assessment on adult literacy and the new technologies, this study profiled the similarities and differences among Appalachian and Californian adults with low literacy skills. Two teams of researchers each profiled six adults with low literacy skills. The study population was selected so as to reflect a diverse mix of ages,…

Reports on a study that examined the literacy behavior of 132 elderly Blacks in a large city environment with a high concentration of undereducated adults. Found that the group developed the necessary literacy skills to meet the demands of their social environment. (JOW)

Although the majority of today's young adults meet or surpass the "literacy" standards of 25 years ago, they often lack the level of literacy needed to meet current demands. The National Assessment of Educational Progress studied a nationally representative sample of 3,600 young American adults, aged 21 to 25, to determine how well they could…

Literacy trends among Black adults in the Republic of South Africa and in some Black states in southern Africa were determined from data obtained from population census reports from 1946 to 1970. Problems concerning the determination of literacy statistics included differing definitions of literacy and data that were subjective, difficult to…

According to the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey, rural workers score somewhat lower than urban workers in ability to use written and quantitative materials. However, scores of rural and urban young adults are similar, reflecting recent improvements in rural education. Rural workers earn less than urban workers with similar literacy skills;…

Individually administered literacy assessments were conducted with approximately 6,000 adults representing the 20 million persons served by the U.S. Department of Labor's (DOL) Employment and Training Administration through the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) or the Employment Service/Unemployment Insurance programs. Information-processing…

A 6-month study examined the attitudes of older, low-literate adults toward using computers to learn to read and tried to determine the effectiveness of Penn State Adult Literacy Courseware for beginning readers with older, low-literate adults at a community-based senior center. The students were 10 black adults, aged 66 to 86 and educated at the…

Two studies examined why many adults choose not to attend adult basic education (ABE) classes and ways of improving retention in ABE. In the first study, 17 adults from the Pittsburgh area who had recently quit attending ABE classes (termed "reluctant learners") and 20 adults who had persisted in ABE were interviewed. It was recommended…

Used longitudinal data from a sample of African-American children of teenaged mothers in the Baltimore, Maryland, area to examine determinants of functional literacy in adulthood. Found that preschool cognitive and behavioral functioning predicted literacy in young adulthood. Family environmental factors that predicted literacy in young adulthood…

A study was made of the prose, document, and quantitative literacy skills of adults in the United States by their highest level of educational attainment. In addition, the study examined the literacy skills of recent General Educational Development (GED) graduates. The data used in the study came from the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey…

From November 1989 to June 1990, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) conducted an individually administered assessment of a representative sampling of some 6,000 adults to determine the literacy skills of the 20,037,087 persons being served by the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) and Employment Service/Unemployment Insurance (ES/UI) programs,…

Two separate research reports are presented in this paper. In the first report, we have identified through literacy research three sets of job-related reading tasks for adults: (1) those involved in getting a job, (2) those concerned with learning a job, and (3) those concerned with doing a job. National surveys have indicated that the black,…

The following are among the 56 papers included in this proceedings: "Contextual Factors Associated with Evaluation Practices of Selected Adult and Continuing Education Providers in Malaysia" (S. Ahmad); "The Professional Ethic and the Spirit of Post-Modernism" (P. Armstrong); "Transforming the Teacher-Student…