James Starts Learning Literacy

I've committed to liveblogging my experiences in grad school so I'm going to do just that!

Last night I reread some articles for my only online course, Adult Literacy. The course appears to be focused on defining the problems facing Adult Literacy and evaluating various programs and solutions here in the US and internationally. Given that I care quite a bit about adolescent literacy, this course is a nice corollary. It's basically "what happens when the kids never learn to read". Prior to the fisrt class "discussion" (yes, online classes appear to be the same everywhere) I read two introductory articles. I'll tackle each one below.

The first is an introduction to the National Research Council's Improving Adult Literacy Instruction: Options for Practice and Research. This report was written in 2012 by the Committee on Learning Sciences as part of a broader review of education in the United States. If anything, reading this introduction first is a great way to describe the problem of inadequate Adult Literacy. The report is heavy on statistics. 90 million adults in the US lack the literacy skills for a "fully productive, secure life." It also covers the impacts of inadequate literacy: increased unemployment and lower wages, limited access to healthcare, lower civic and community engagement, increased incarceration. Clearly some of this is obvious to anyone who takes the time to think about how being able to read and write can change your life. Still, statistics have some impact and definitely give us an idea of the scope of the challenge facing, well, me. Of note, the data they're pulling from does not include people of limited English proficiency due to speaking a foreign language. If anything, the report may be undercounting the limited literacy population. Also, the population of young adults (defined as 16-20, not enrolled in US k-12 education) entering adult literacy courses, labs, communities, and other forms of adult literacy education has grown to about 25%. Half of the attendees were under 25 years old. In other words, this is an inherent and pernicious shortcoming in the US k-12 education system. The burden for educating these students often falls on Community Colleges, which is likely to be one focus of this course.

For me, it's a pretty clear sign that my intuition about the flaws in my own classroom reflecting a larger systemic failure was correct. Large numbers of students are leaving schools without the basic reading and writing skills necessary to function in our society. I would like more granular knowledge of what, specifically, they're lacking. As this is only an introduction, I will have to dig further into the report and its data to see if I can find out. The data presented so far also divides up racial groups. As you'd expect, African Americans perform worse than their peers. Whites and Asians performed best. Many things in education are multivariate and I expect Adult Literacy to be no different.

The second article is a research analysis of studies published between 2000 and 2012 relating to any and all approaches to Adult Literacy. Some were merely like the above, a definition of the scope and depth of the problem. Some were evaluations of instructional methods or of curriculum. It paints a slightly different picture of Adult Literacy because it focuses on what's being done to address the problem. Overall Perin (the author) reviewed 43 studies which met her selection criteria (won't bore you with it, but basically it had to focus specifically on adult literacy and without significant methodological flaws or it wasn't included). She further divided the research up into what was being researched. Some were "assessment studies" that, like the above, focused on identifying characteristics of the population. Others were studies of the effectiveness of instructional methods, and studies only describing instructional methods. As someone wanting to bring better literacy instruction to the secondary classrooms of America, I'm very interested in effectiveness.

To my surprise, the results were worthless. Perin begins her discussion saying that there is "still much to be learned". Of the 43 studies, none gives a clear picture of what, if anything, can be done. None of the effectiveness studies showed any significant gains and none of the descriptive studies offered any serious evaluation of efficacy. In the end, she calls for further study and broader research goals. The problem is real, but solutions are going to be nontrivial. On the receiving end, I'm actually quite excited about this prospect because I may want to try and publish some research relating to late adolescent literacy. I would have preferred to see more analysis of the methodologies because my own literacy with regard to research is poor. I'm excited to read more and, hopefully, learn how to better evaluate the information that is available.

All in all, it's an odd start to my return to education. On one hand, it's obvious our education systems faces a number of challenges, literacy among them, and that those challenges are going to be difficult to tackle. I wasn't expecting, however, to see such an open admission that we have no solutions on day one. I have a feeling that there will be solutions in this and other courses. Hopefully, the lack of proper research doesn't color my perception of these solutions as I come across them.