The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) assessed the English literacy skills of a nationally representative sample of 18,500 U.S. adults (age 16 and older) residing in private households. NAAL is the first national assessment of adult literacy since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). The NAAL and NALS produced direct…

Recent theories have posited that the hippocampus and thalamus serve distinct, yet related, roles in episodic memory. Whereas the hippocampus has been implicated in long-term memory encoding and storage, the thalamus, as a whole, has been implicated in the selection of items for subsequent encoding and the use of retrieval strategies. However,…

The primary purpose of this report is to explore within the Canadian context the relationship between Self-Reported Learning Disabilities (SRLD) and low literacy performance using the Canadian portion of the public data set from the 2003 International Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (IALSS). Two primary research questions related to SRLD…

The present study examined data from a large, nationally representative sample--the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NCES, 2007)--to examine how computer use and Internet-based literacy practices (use of e-mail, searching for information on the Internet, and Internet chatting) were related to prose, document, and quantitative literacy…

Web-based software was used to deliver and record the effects of programmed instruction that progressively added formal prompts until attempts were successful, programmed instruction with one attempt, and prose tutorials. Error-contingent progressive prompting took significantly longer than programmed instruction and prose. Both forms of…

Explored connection between everyday activities of different aged adults (N=54) and their performance on prose recall task. Regression analyses showed that demographic variables of age, education, and verbal ability were best predictors of prose recall. Total time spent reading and other reading variables were also significantly correlated with…

Examined reading habits and activities which may require skills used in prose recall tasks as they occurred in everyday lives of young (N=18), middle-aged (N=18), and older (N=18) adults who kept structured diaries. Everyday activities and reading habits were related to daily life requirements. Pattern of activities was influenced by current…

Assessed degree to which anxiety, hostility, depression, and metamemory predicted recall performance on word list and prose passage. Results from 65 older and 65 younger adults indicated different patterns of personality predictors and some consistent metamemory predictors across tasks. Different measures of anxiety related differently to…

High cognitive processing capacity (CPC) students were superior to low-CPC students in prose learning. Of the four learning modes--programmed instruction (PI), control, chunking study outline, and adjunct questions--PI was the most effective. Substantial CPC and performance correlations and poor long-term retention suggested that PI was not best…

Based on Carroll's model of school learning, this study sought to identify factors to help explain the discrepancy between time needed for learning and time actually spent in learning. Ninety-six boys were required to read and reread a passage until 100 percent accuracy was achieved on a criterion test. (Author/PN)

Reviews study of 30 graduate students that investigated the possible contribution of pictures to the recall and retention of information presented in written prose. The two variables considered were the durability of picture effects, and the effect on recall of information that was not pictured. (LRW)