In 1999, Ministers responsible for school education agreed to the new set of "National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century," with the aim of providing high quality schooling in Australia which would secure for students the necessary knowledge, understanding, skills and values for a productive and rewarding life. As a…

This curriculum guide was developed to help literacy practitioners present an eight-lesson workplace literacy course for hospital workers who assist patients in completing their daily menus. Presented in the introduction are the following: overview of the curriculum development project, project activity schedule, course overview, and course time…

This workplace skills course on mathematics is a review of basic number concepts focused on helping participants to understand and be able to record filling level data accurately. The introductory materials in the curriculum guide include a course outline, course objectives, a topical outline, information on course length and continuing education…

The participatory rural appraisal (PRA) technique was used with 1,550 women and 420 men in more than 100 villages in Uganda, El Salvador, and Bangladesh over a 2-year period to develop and pilot test an approach to literacy education called REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques). The REFLECT approach, which…

This handbook, the third printing of the original 1976 edition, presents an eclectic combination of activities gathered from parents and teachers of preschool children, with a focus on the process rather than the product of learning. Its goal is the establishment of positive experiences and sound interpersonal relationships between adults and…

In May 1993, 1,060 people in England and Wales were surveyed on the use of basic skills in everyday life. Data obtained from these questionnaires were weighted to reflect the demographic profile of the population in terms of age, gender, working status, and social class. Interviewees were asked 40 questions about activities they had done in the 7…

These four issues of the quarterly publication of the Saskatchewan Literacy Network in Canada are each devoted to a separate aspect of literacy and literacy education. In addition to an editorial and series of articles on the issue topic, each issue includes book reviews and network news. Some issues also include interviews and annotated…

This curriculum includes outlines for a series of professional readiness courses designed to improve the various basic skills required of hospital personnel. The first eight sections consist of course outlines/materials on the following topics: user-friendly arithmetic, user-friendly fractions, user-friendly algebra, problem solving through…

This publication contains the three numeracy units of the three levels of Support Materials for Agricultural Training (SMAT) in agricultural production: Level 1 (starting), 2 (continuing), and 3 (completing). The units are designed to help the learner improve his or her numeracy skills needed to deal with agricultural production. SMAT materials…

In the UK, there is a marked gender gap in the educational attainment of boys and girls. At the end of compulsory education, 10 per cent fewer boys achieve 5 or more good GCSEs. This gap is by no means confined to GCSE. It is evident at all Key Stages. Furthermore, some indicators suggest that the gap has widened over time. In this paper, we…

A literature review examined the relationship of adults' verbal and mathematical literacy to employers' investments in training, employee wages, unemployment probabilities, unemployment duration, technological change, productivity, and economic growth. Most of the publications analyzed dealt with the United States. The analysis revealed that…

A discussion of numeracy (the ability to cope confidently with the mathematical demands of everyday life), focuses on provision of numeracy instruction alongside English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction for learners with low literacy skills. It looks first at considerations and methods for assessing student numeracy needs, including the…

After 10 years of teaching rule-driven, procedure-based, algorithm-oriented mathematics, an elementary teacher describes how she began to rethink her teaching style after returning to school for a graduate degree. Her rethinking is based on the first of four student teaching events that spanned an entire school year in which she used the…

Although adult numeracy or basic mathematics classes have existed throughout Australia since at least the 1970s, they did not receive prominence in provision or policy until the endorsement of the Australian Language and Literacy Policy in 1991. The following are still lacking, however: expectation that adult numeracy teachers will have formal…

This document consists of four issues of this serial issued during 1993. They contain articles of interest to those teaching, funding, and organizing programs in adult literacy, second language, and baskc skills. Issue number 48 consists of these six articles: "So You Thought You Had Funding for ESOL [English for Speakers of Other…