MOCCA-C is an assessment of adult reading ability designed for early diagnosis of reading problems, for formative assessment in reading intervention planning, for assessment of reading improvement over time, and for assessment of reading intervention outcomes. It uses both narrative and expository reading passages and it currently has four forms.…

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…

A study examined systematically the relationship of 40 teacher characteristics and the reading improvement of adult basic education (ABE) and adult secondary education (ASE) students. Subjects were 50 adult basic and secondary education teachers and 663 of their students from a dozen adult literacy programs in a Southern state. A multiple…

This paper was designed to show that the two seemingly disparate concepts of andragogy (the study of how adults learn) and whole language are compatible and should be considered by planners and implementers of adult literacy programs. Guiding principles that both andragogy and whole language share are: (1) active participation of learners; (2) use…

Illiterate workers in industrial jobs can endanger themselves and fellow workers by misreading warning signs and can cost companies millions by misreading instructions. The problem of literacy is also apparent in offices, where often dictated correspondence must be retyped at least once because of errors. Of 800 companies surveyed, 35% felt they…

The University of Akron's Reading Assessment Component (RAC) research study assessed the effectiveness of a computer-based literacy program, Principles of the Alphabet Literacy System (PALS), as an alternative to classroom instruction for functionally illiterate adults living in Summit County, Ohio. The RAC study assessed four objectives: (1)…

"The Reading Project" in adult basic education (ABE), designed by the Province of Saskatchewan, consists of 14 sections containing 512 exercises in listening, reading, and spelling skills. This study compares the effectiveness of the project with conventional teaching of reading in ABE classes. A total of 257 adults participated in the…

Four papers on the role of libraries in adult education were presented at the 1984 IFLA general conference meeting of the Section on Adult Education. They include: (1) "The Library of the Pompeia Leisure Centre, Sao Paulo, Brazil," in which Apaty Peroni of Brazil provides background on the community, location, collection, personnel,…

Evaluation studies conducted in 1978 at three sites yielded encouraging results regarding the ability of the Basic Skills Learning System (BSLS) to achieve the goals of adult basic education and demonstrated that effective curriculum models utilizing well-designed instructional paradigms can offer high quality instruction in the basic skills when…

The major goal of the University of Southern Maine Reading Academy Project was to demonstrate the effectiveness of process-oriented, diagnostic/prescriptive instruction by trained tutors in raising the literacy levels of adults reading at less than a sixth grade equivalency level. Preservice and inservice training using an empirical model of…