Indigenous communities have strengths and wisdom beyond Westernized culture's recognition and understanding. However, there continues to be significant difference in literacy and life skills between Indigenous and non-Indigenous adults. In this article, I reflect on a project that investigated how technology could best support adult literacy…

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…

Learning is critical to both economic prosperity and social cohesion. E-government learning, which refers to the government's use of web-based technologies to facilitate learning about subjects that are useful to citizens, is relatively new, relevant, and potentially cost-effective. This work proposes and verifies that the technology acceptance…

Community colleges have multiple missions and one of them is to provide open access services to those seeking to further their education. Community colleges provide remedial courses in math, reading, and writing because many of their students do not meet entrance requirements in these core subjects. However, the usual developmental education track…

This applied dissertation was designed to identify the characteristics of students enrolled in a GED® preparation program who transitioned to postsecondary programs at the same institution after passing the GED® test. The characteristics studied included age; gender; ethnicity; prematriculation scores in reading, language, and math in the Test of…

A hybrid Extension project is introduced that uses a traditional Extension delivery model without the complete infrastructure of Cooperative Extension Services. The absence of this local organizational support and infrastructure necessitates new thinking regarding how Information Technology (IT) can support this project and hybrid Extension…

Adults with limited education and skills--those who lack the education and skills needed for full participation in U.S. culture and economy--are increasing in numbers. However, the knowledge base addressing this population and their educational needs is fragmented across the literature of several disciplines. A comprehensive review and critique of…

This paper attempts to identify some tools to help practioners think about, debate and plan Workplace Literacy and Essential Skills (WLES) programs. Such tools are necessary so that discussions between practitioners aiming to clarify good practice and successful approaches can get beyond mere descriptions of what happened. In order to compare and…

Results from randomized controlled trials of learning strategies instruction with 375 adult basic education participants are reported. Reading outcomes from whole group strategic instruction in 1 of 4 learning strategies were compared to outcomes of reading instruction delivered in the context of typical adult education units on social studies,…

Enthusiastic learners acting as community learning champions (CLCs) are scarcely a novelty. There has been a surge of interest in what they have to offer in the last couple of years, thanks in large part to a government programme, which has funded training and support for learning champions through 50 community projects across the country, and a…

In 2009, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) published a technical report titled "Indirect County and State Estimates of the Percentage of Adults at the Lowest Literacy Level for 1992 and 2003," (ED503830). NCES also published a corresponding online tool (http://nces.ed.gov/naal/estimates/index.aspx) that allows users to…

Low literacy levels in adult learners pose an educational and public health challenge to practitioners and the scientific community. Increasing demands placed on literacy can limit opportunities in the workplace and access to health-related resources, negatively affecting public health. Current estimates from the National Center for Education…

This report presents the results of the formative evaluation of the Adult Learning, Literacy and Essential Skills Program (ALLESP). Data collection related to this evaluation took place between November 2008 and May 2009. The evaluation resulted in the following four recommendations: (1) It is recommended that Program objectives and activities…

This conceptual study examines the importance of relationships between teachers and students in court-mandated adult education settings. Although research has been done on the importance of relationships between teachers and incarcerated students, there have been no outstanding studies on the relationships developed between teachers and students…

Adult literacy interventions often rely on models of reading validated with children or adult populations with a broad range of reading abilities. Such models do not fully satisfy the need for intervention research and development for adults with low literacy. Thus, the authors hypothesized that a model representing the relationship between…