To learn productively and experience academic success, students need access to curricula and instructional approaches that are "culturally relevant" and "culturally responsive". Culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy uses "cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes" and thus "empowers students…

This article explores the perspective of parents regarding their elementary children's writing in one rural, elementary school. During the research, thematic strands emerged indicating that parents may value their children's writing for purposes that differ from the purposes deemed appropriate by the school. Upon interviewing 30 parents/guardians,…

This article presents four symposium papers on assessment. It includes: (1) "Closed Systems and Standardized Writing Tests" (Chris M. Anson); (2) "Information Illiteracy and Mass Market Writing Assessments" (Les Perelman); (3) "Genre, Testing, and the Constructed Realities of Student Achievement" (Mya Poe); and (4)…

Culture has been shown to influence the way people apprehend their physical environment. Cognitive orientation is more holistic in East Asian cultures, which emphasize relationships and connectedness among objects in the field, than in Western cultures, which are more prone to focus exclusively on the object and its attributes. We investigated…

This is an abstract about Uganda. When the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government came to power in 1986, it had to address many challenges in order to achieve its objectives among which were: poverty eradication, eradication of illiteracy, reducing unemployment, bringing peace and prosperity for all. However, the government realised that in…

Internationally, a move towards inclusive education has been adopted as the preferred model in most education systems. Yet there are still many jurisdictions that find that they simply do not have the resources necessary to embark on such a major development as inclusion. A critical issue in many such regions has been the difficulty in reforming…

Cautions against the common tendency to find in illiteracy an explanation for poverty, unemployment, disease, and hopelessness. Argues that to solve a pressing social problem it must be described correctly, and that social problems are solved by providing opportunities. (SR)

Communication is an important input in development. The role of communication is socio-economic and cultural development at national and international levels. Development is considered an important component of progress. The progressive change is described as alterations in awareness, motivation and participation of the individuals. With the…

Despite the fact that there are nationwide literacy programs in Turkey in order to raise the literacy rate, the participation of illiterate individuals in these programs is not at a satisfactory level. This article is a study into the popular ideas, attitudes, and value patterns that negatively affect participation in literacy programs in a slum…

On the eve of CONFINTEA VI, discussion and debates on promoting literacy is being revived. However, in most cases, the discussion limits itself to the definitional nuances of literacy and falls short of critiquing the global policy making inertia that violates the human rights obligations to the millions of adults remaining illiterate. This…

A research survey was designed to investigate the factor affecting participation of illiterate adults in adult education in Kenya and suggests ways to improve on the literacy levels. From the findings it was established that lack of conducive learning environments for adult learners, unavailability of enough instructional materials, negative…

In this paper, the author has attempted to analyze and assess the progress of education for all (EFA) in India from 1985/1986 to 2005/2006. A similar analysis by the same author on this subject, for the period 1950-1986, was published in this journal in 1990. During that period of 35 years the development of EFA was apparently impressive, but…

When, in the 1970s, industrialised countries, confident of their citizens' universal literacy, discovered that significant proportion of their adult population had difficulties in dealing with the rapid changes they were going through, a new term to explain this phenomenon was coined: functional literacy, or its negative, functional illiteracy.…

Some of the many topics which challenge psychologists working in the literacy field are: (1) the priority that should be attached to illiteracy in relationship to other national and personal problems; (2) varying definitions of "literacy" and "illiteracy" that inhibit communication and generalization; (3) the lack of valid and…