Motivational research identifies utility value, or the importance of a learning task to future goals, as central to motivation to learn. This study analyzed survey data (N=86) collected from adult literacy learners to examine their utility value of writing improvement in grammar and spelling skills, word processing skills, and planning, drafting,…

Motivational research identifies utility value, or the importance of a learning task to future goals, as central to motivation to learn. This study analyzed survey data (N = 86) collected from adult literacy learners to examine their utility value of writing improvement in grammar and spelling skills, word processing skills, and planning,…

"Biometrics" are physical or behavioral human characteristics that can be used to identify a person. It is widely known that keystroke or typing dynamics for short, fixed texts (e.g., passwords) could serve as a behavioral biometric. In this study, we investigate whether keystroke data from essay responses can lead to a reliable…

Peer-to-peer (P2P) learning within two distinct groups of disadvantaged adults was studied during a two-hour computer skills workshop. Of interest was whether or not P2P learning with this population was a viable method for increasing performance and confidence. Two qualified instructors at two locations taught the same introductory…

Michael Gove has correctly lambasted the current curriculum for information and communication technology (ICT): his proposed solution is as wrong as the current curriculum, as findings from the Penceil Research Project on how to engage non-users of ICTs demonstrate. Learning how to use a word processor and a spreadsheet is a useful low-level…

The visual front-end of reading is most often associated with orthographic processing. The left ventral occipito-temporal cortex seems to be preferentially tuned for letter string and word processing. In contrast, little is known of the mechanisms responsible for pre-orthographic processing: the processing of character strings regardless of…

Connectives are cohesive devices that signal the relations between clauses and are critical to the construction of a coherent representation of a text's meaning. The authors investigated young readers' knowledge, processing, and comprehension of temporal, causal, and adversative connectives using offline and online tasks. In a cloze task,…

Keyboarding skill is an important target for adult education programs due to the ubiquity of computers in modern work environments. A previous study showed that novice typists learned key locations quickly but that fluency took a relatively long time to develop. In the present study, novice typists achieved fluent performance in nearly half the…

Most business communication textbooks treat "unfavorable" communications as written documents--denials of credit, collection requests, rejections for employment, inability to meet deadlines, etc. These written "unfavorable" documents are no longer actually written by most employees. In fact, many of these communications are computer generated and…

There are many readability tools that instructors can use to help adult learners select reading materials. We describe and compare different types of readability tools: formulas calculated by hand, tools found on the Web, tools embedded in a word processing program, and readability tools found in a commercial software program. Practitioners do not…

Everyone knows that lack of internet access can reinforce the social and economic disadvantages already facing some older people. Recognising the divisive nature of digital exclusion, the government has invested 2.8 million British Pounds in Get Digital, a project that will enable sheltered housing residents to develop computer and internet…

Senior citizens represent the fastest growing demographic worldwide. As indicated in the Year 2000 U.S. Census, there are 35 million people 65 or older in the United States (U.S.). By 2030, it is estimated that there will be about 70 million older adults in the U.S. alone (Chadwick-Dias, McNulty, & Tullis, 2003). With the older population…

The present study investigated the influence of word processing on the writing of students of English as a second language (ESL) and on writing assessment as well. Twenty-one adult Mandarin-Chinese speakers with advanced English proficiency living in Toronto participated in the study. Each participant wrote two comparable writing tasks under…