With an eye toward contemporary skill building to meet community centered economic needs, organizations such as Literacy Volunteers of America are increasingly pressured to examine new avenues in promoting employment readiness skills for the newly literate. These organizations and countless others have come to the realization that being prepared…

Guidelines for eliciting useful feedback focus on planned opportunities, collection during programs, multiple methods, descriptive information, feasible changes, clarification from learners, investigation of prompt response to learner concerns, staff discussion, receptivity to change, and commitment of resources. (SK)

Examines ways in which the evaluative criteria of literacy education are being displaced by those with a work force development focus. Illustrates the consequences of criterion bleed: the concept of basic skills is being shifted from a means of democratic participation to a tool for employment. Urges adult literacy educators to adopt a critical…

Workplace literacy programs can be a means of recruiting and retaining workers who might not otherwise participate. Familiar, accessible locations, flexible schedules, and the job relatedness of curriculum and materials are essential elements in the success of such programs. (SK)

Analysis of reading applications in everyday life and on the job should be done at the task level because a task is the lowest level of behavior that describes the performance of a meaningful function. The main objectives of such an analysis are to identify the technical aspects of the actions a learner performs in a functional setting and to…

This interim report describes the first few months' work of a task force that developed a set of procedures for conducting a literacy task analysis. A literacy task analysis could be used by employers, union delegates, human resource personnel, trainers, and adult educators to understand better the specific workplace training needs of employees,…

This report presents speeches and other materials from a seminar to provide an opportunity for specialists from a wide range of backgrounds to take part in a joint reflection on the new challenges and opportunities facing continuing education and training in an enlarged European Community. It is intended to stimulate ideas for a new policy…

Six demonstration projects were conducted in England to identify and help meet the basic communication needs of individuals who embarked on work-related skills training. Unemployed adults were divided into two strands. Strand A concentrated on those adults who without significant help with basic communication skills would be unable to reach the…

Educational problems underlie the crisis in the high-tech workplace. Insufficient expenditures for workplace education result in low productivity. Technology requires a skilled work force; the chief competitive advantage for a nation will be its skilled workers. Workplace literacy has been a half-hearted effort. Investment of billions by U.S.…

This report documents, in case study format, eight workplace literacy programs in Canada. Introductory materials highlight conclusions and discuss reasons for undertaking the project to document the Canadian experience in basic skills training from the perspective of the employer and employee and program design. Each case study or program profile…

This six-chapter report describes Hong Kong's experience in promoting nonformal and quasi-formal education programs aimed at enabling adults, especially those with limited formal educational experience, to engage actively in social activities and cope with the change of employment conditions in the city during its post-World War II growth from…

This document summarizes the first New York State conference on adult education for the homeless. The conference addressed issues facing homeless people, such as education, social services, employment and training, housing, drug and substance abuse, and mental health. Successful programs, policies, practices, and the latest research were…

On May 5, 2006, the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) in Australia announced the launch of "Research Messages, 2005"--a collection of summaries on all research projects published or completed by NCVER in 2005. The summaries are clustered under five broad themes used by NCVER to organise all of its vocational…

The Labour Adjustment Initiative was developed in Ontario to provide the ever-increasing number of laid-off workers with remedial basic skills training in order to prepare them for other jobs or further training. The model developed by the Literacy Branch of the Ontario government emphasized a collaborative approach that drew together all of the…

This report describes the following components of the Nestle Workplace Literacy Project: six job task analyses, curricula for six workplace basic skills training programs, delivery of courses using these curricula, and evaluation of the process. These six job categories were targeted for training: forklift loader/checker, BB's processing systems…