Because children who are deaf or hard of hearing are being identified at birth, fitted with advanced hearing technology, and enrolled in early intervention programs, families increasingly seek professionals who can provide services that support their choice of listening and spoken language. The increased demand for these services and shortages of…

Most successes in intelligent tutoring systems have come in well-defined domains like algebra or physics. We investigate how to support students in acquiring ill-defined skills of intercultural competence using an online environment that employs clips of feature films from a target culture. To test the effectiveness of a set of attention-focusing…

Project CONNECT (Inmate Advocacy) was developed to provide counseling to inmates involved in the education programs at Fayette County Prison in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, before and immediately following their release. Twenty-one inmates who had been selected through a screening process received individual basic skills remediation in a classroom…

An adult educator in Butler, Pennsylvania, noticed that, although students who took the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) seemed highly motivated to improve their basic skills in mathematics and spatial relations, only 2 of her 20 students who took the GATB made a concerted effort to develop their vocabulary. Thinking that those two students…

The document details the development of a project to provide adult students with the academic and work skills required for admission to the Regional Skill Center, which is an adult technical school serving Erie County, Pennsylvania. The body of the report summarizes the following project outcomes: development of a four-tiered system of work force…

This special demonstration project was undertaken to field test and disseminate a curriculum entitled Emergency English for Refugees (EER). Designed to meet the immediate English language needs of pre- and non-literate adult refugees and immigrants, the EER is a 26-unit competency-based English-as-a-second-language (ESL) curriculum that deals with…

For seven years, the Test of Adult Basic Education (TABE) was the primary standardized assessment instrument used by the adult education program of the Midwestern Intermediate Unit IV (MIUIV) of the Pennsylvania Department of Education Bureau of Adult Basic and Literacy Education. While reviewing its current assessment procedures, the MIUIV's…

This document includes a report on Project Tune-Up, which was conducted to update Project Prepare, a program to help Pennsylvania adult learners prepare for business school entrance examinations, the PSB [Pennsylvania State Board]-Aptitude for Practical Nursing examination, and college placement examinations. The report describes how the Project…

Issues surrounding teaching competencies in family literacy programs were examined in a study of two well-established Even Start sites in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The program, which served 34 ethnically diverse adult learners, offered 25 hours of adult basic education, general educational development (GED), and…