National Institute for Literacy - Focus On Basics Discussion List

Stephen Reder is University Professor and Chair of the Department ofApplied Linguistics at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon. His research interests focus on adult literacy and second language development. He is the Principal Investigator of two NCSALL projects: the Adult ESOL Labsite project and the Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning.
Clare Strawn is Assistant Professor at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, and an analyst on the Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning. She is interested in patterns of program participation, the intersection of learning and community development, social capital influences on learning strategies, and technology.
Lauri McLellan Schoneck is a professor at Seminole Community College, where she teaches ABE and GED math courses. A graduate of Florida State University, she has her master's in special education and has taught both K-12 students and adults. She is currently serving a second term on the Florida Department of Education Practitioners' Task Force on Adults with Learning Disabilities as a community college representative.
Molly K. Robertson is the founding director of the Indiana GED ON TV program. She left high school at 16, earned a GED in 1982, and holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's in telecommunications. She lives in Muncie, Indiana, with two large, rowdy, black poodles.

Steve Reder, NCSALL researcher and director of the Portland Lab School and Clare Strawn, an analyst on the Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning (LSAL), discussed the LSAL results as they related to the prevalence of learner self-study, and as were outlined in their article in the latest issue of FOB. In addition, NCSALL researchers Lauren Shoneck, and Molly Robertson were available to discuss two practical examples of self-study, distance learning and GED via TV, respectively.

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I am pleased to announce our guest speakers for this week's discussion about broadening the concepts of participation and program support forlearner self-study.

Welcome to researcher/authors Steve Reder and Clare Strawn, who are joining us to discuss the Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning (LSAL) and its findings regarding the prevalence of self -study among adult learners. They will also discuss how programs can best support learner self study. Then on Wednesday, we will introduce Lauri Shoneck and Molly Robertson, who will discuss two different models of self study.

Please read the articles below, from Focus on Basics issue 8C, and send in your comments and questions for the authors and others to discuss. (Please note that Steve and Clare are on west coast time, so us easterners will have to be patient in the mornings!)

Let me introduce myself and our study a bit. I'm Steve Reder. I'm a professor of applied linguistics at Portland State University. My research and teaching interests center around how adults develop literacy and language abilities. The project we're discussing this week, the Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning (LSAL), has been following a sample of about 1,000 adults from the target population for adult education over the past 8-9 years. There are a couple things that make this study unique within our field. We are following adults who may or may not participate in adult literacy education programs rather than just program participants. We periodically interview our "panel" of subjects -- and assess their literacy skills and practices - regardless of whether they are in programs. We conduct in-depth qualitative interviews with some of individuals to complement the more formal interviews and assessments, helping us to interpret the patterns of change we see in the quantitative data. When individuals move - as they often do - during the course of this longitudinal study, we attempt to follow them. So far we have retained and continued to follow about 90% of our original sample over this long period of time, even though some individuals have moved away, a few may have gone to jail or prison, many experienced major changes in family and job situations, weathered a significant recession, and in general displayed great richness and diversity in their unfolding adult lives.

The LSAL data give us a new view of the learners who come to programs as well as of their counterparts who do not come to programs. This gives us a broad perspective on individuals' decisions to participate or not, and over time, a new perspective on patterns of participation and other learning activities as people move in and out of programs. From what we are seeing so far, there is a "swirl" of learning activities that surrounds programs, with adults engaged in a rich variety of learning experiences to improve their basic skills or prepare for the GED. Some adults in this "swirl" come to our programs, whereas others may not because of job, family or other constraints. By considering this broader "swirl" of learning activity, we see higher rates of participation and more persistence of learning than if we take the more traditional program-based view of learning. We are trying to think about how programs may be able to broaden their outreach and support of these additional learners and this additional learning.

Here are a few questions to think about as we discuss this issue of FOB. Have you had students in your programs who move in and out of participation because of changing needs or life circumstances? Have you tried to find ways to stay in touch with and support them even when they stop coming to class? Have they told you about friends or family members who would like to come to classes if other things weren't getting in the way? Have you tried ways to "blend" activities in your program with learning activities that students could carry out on their own? What role do you see for technology in blending program- and self-directed learning activities for improving basic skills?

Have you had students in your programs who move in and out of participation because of changing needs or life circumstances? Yes all the time for the last 37 years. Many return again at other sites and some return to the same site.

Have you tried to find ways to stay in touch with and support them even when they stop coming to class? Yes, we tracked our family literacy parents from an Even Start Program in Salem. We interviewed these families 10 years after. I still have contact with about 20 of the families so I am regularly updated. Some have trouble still with health issues and maintaining employment.

Have they told you about friends or family members who would like to come to classes if other things weren't getting in the way? Yes and talked about what type of program or tutoring might work for them, and which instructors.

Have you tried ways to "blend" activities in your program with learning activities that students could carry out on their own? Yes, take home tasks such as emergency evacuation plans for fires and floods, etc.

What role do you see for technology in blending program- and self-directed learning activities for improving basic skills? I think that On line choices have been a huge bonus for students. Many have access to computers through libraries and their on PC's.

Thanks for being in the discussion and for such an intereting study I'm struck by two things, based on my experience in several adult learning centers: first, how on earth did you manage to keep in touch with such a high percentage of your subjects, and second, how do they manage self-study when they usually can't manage homework?

These may seem like frivolous questions, but for my program they go to the heart of the question. We find it very difficult to contact students after they have "stopped out" -- phone numbers and addresses change and we have neither the time nor resources to keep up. In these circumstances, do you think making resources available to support self-study would help us retain contact, or would simply be a waste of time and effort?

Secondly, my students have a great deal of difficulty completing homework because of their life and work situations. I can understand that self-study will often fit better into their difficult and often-changing situations, but I wonder about the wisdom of putting time and effort into resources that would at best (in my view anyway) be only intermittently used.

I hope you have positive answers -- I'm sure self-study goes on, and in fact I've seen it when people have studied for themselves over a summer and return in the fall more skilled than when they left. It just seems an extremely tricky subject from an institutional point of view.

Unfortunately I will be away for a few hours, but I'll be back during your workday, anyhow!

Hello - This is Clare Strawn. I have been working with Steve on the Longitudinal Study since the start. Most of my analytic work has been on understanding patterns of participation in adult education programs. I am interested in hearing if and how teachers incorporate the project of "learning how to learn" into the curriculum, giving learners tools for self study and lifelong learning.

In response to the question about how we retained our sample. From the beginning of the study we decided to invest in building relationships with our respondents. We value their contributions with payment. We have an in-house system for keeping in touch with people by calling them every three months to update our information. It is also very important to ask them for contacts of friends and relatives who can help us find them when we loose contact with us.

Good questions. I think Clare has addressed the first one about how we keep in touch with our subjects. Your second question is harder to answer. Many students do engage in self-study because they aren't able to attend programs regularly because of the life and work situations you mentioned. Noting that this happens is easier than describing how they manage it and how effective it is. Maintaining contact with students after they have stopped out could be difficult & resource-intensive if appropriate tools are not in place to bridge between self-study and programs and to help learners manage their self-study. We are experimenting with one approach, The Learner Web, that is designed to provide these kind of bridges and supportive pieces. We see this as a promising resource for both programs and learners. But there are all the problems that you describe, to be sure.

Today we welcome Lauri Schoneck who joins us to discuss distance learning as a form of self study. Please read her article below:

Think about any experiences, preconceptions or questions you have about distance learning, and be ready to discuss them with Lauri. Steve and Clare may also be able to offer some thoughts on how programs can better support this kind of self-study.

Hello all...I am Lauri M. Schoneck, an Adult Basic Education (ABE)/GED professor with Seminole Community College (SCC) in Sanford, Florida. Although the article I wrote focuses on self-study, my main interest is adults with learning disabilities. I currently serve on the Florida Dept. Of Education's Practioner's Task Force on Adults with Learning Disabilities.

Seminole Community College is a real gem in the adult education world. Due to it's vast resources and generous support, our ABE/GED dept. is able to provide a wide variety of options/programs to our students--free of charge. The "Distance Learning as a Backup" article focuses on our Home Study/GED Online program at SCC.

As I am not the one who runs the Home Study/GED Online program, I'd like to reserve the right to refer some questions to our Home Study manager and GED Online professor. :-)

I look forward to hearing from as many of you as possible. I'd be directly interested in anyone who has a similar program, a program in development or someone who has a more complete program--your trials & tribulations, successes and so forth. What are retention rates like for your self-study classes, etc....? Also, Home Study/GED Online has great potential for students with disabilities...I'd be glad to explore that path with anyone as well.

Thanks, Steve and Clare for sharing the LSAL results and your interpretations. It seems from your results that self-study is both more common and more effective than we have tended to think over the years, and that it could be very significant to work harder at encouraging it.

I wonder if learners who have "learned how to learn" as Clare says, or focused on self-study skills during their program participation, are more likely to self-study, and if their self-study is more effective? Steve, Clare, is there any data to answer this?

If we assume that our students are likely self-study at some point, wether combined with or outside of a program, there is probably a lot we can do to encourage that while they are with us. I, too, would love to hear some answers to Clare's question about "how teachers incorporate the project of "learning how to learn" into the curriculum, giving learners tools for self study and lifelong learning."

Thanks for those questions, Julie. Since Clare will probably respond to the "learning to learn" question, let me mention something else. Other LSAL findings that will be coming out in future publications indicate that both program participation and self-study activities contribute to the growth of literacy in adult life, with the largest apparent impact coming from the combination of both programs and self-study -- learners who engage in both (not necessarily at the same time) seem to make the most progress over a long period of time.

We would love to hear from teachers who have tried to build/encourage self-study in their students. Many of the LSAL subjects who have gone to programs spend time in learning centers working independently, drawing on the teacher's support and assistance as needed (sort of a facilitated self-study). It seems plausible that these type of experiences may prepare some students to self-study more effectively on their own (especially if they could easily get help when needed).

My name is Jennifer Rafferty and I oversee the Massachusetts ABE Distance Learning Project. We have been serving adults (both ABE/GED and ESOL) with blended learning since 1999. In the past two years, our dl staff has engaged in a series of discussions about the skills that are needed to be successful in a distance/blended program. Our discussions started off as brainstorming sessions and eventually turned into a project of developing a resource packet that instructors can use to help learners prepare for distance education. While our resource packet and web modules are only in the formative stage as of 2007, and we have not standardized the use of these resources across all dl programs, the packet might shed some light on the skills that all classroom programs should consider incorporating into their curricula. I believe that these skills should be recognized and practiced in classroom settings so that learners who "stop out" can more easily make the transition into distance/blended learning. The resource packet and the orientation modules are available at: http://anywhereanytimeabe.org/?page_id=51 .

I wonder if learners who have "learned how to learn" as Clare says, or focused on self-study >skills during their program participation, are more likely to self-study, and if their self-study >is more effective? Steve, Clare, is there any data to answer this?

WE don't have data that address this question directly, although I think it would be an excellent practitioner research question! The LSAL as not collected much data on the characteristics of courses - pedagogy, etc. What kinds of teacher directed activities that support development of self-study skills do you (or would you) suggest?

About this question of promoting self-study, I consider it to be one of my more important aims as an educator, and virtually everything I do in my school attempts in one way or another to encourage an attitude of continual lifelong learning. I am a radical constructivist in my philosophy of learning and education. Constructivists subscribe to the belief that we all construct our own knowledge from experiences that are personally meaningful. Over the past few years constructivism has been corrupted into notions about teaching in a certain way, but really it is a description of how we learn. Whether we believe it or not, it is what we all do all the time. We have an experience. We take things from the experience and build them into a larger structure of knowledge that is relevant to ourselves.

Our current educational practices sometimes lose sight of this reality. We begin to think of learning as something people do in a school at a certain time and place, or even worse, we think of it as the outcome of something that people do to us when they teach.

In my teaching I try to "cure" people of those notions, as A.S. Neill would say. A big component involves modeling. I, myself, love to learn, and I share that love with my students. By modeling, students see my attitude and they see how I do it. Another component involves giving students freedom to make their own educational choices. I will make suggestions about learning goals and how to pursue them, but I'll never tell my students what courses to take or what to study. That is for them to tell me. A third component involves accepting my students' learning. As a constructivist I know that even though two students may share the same experience, they will learn very different things from it. Each learns what he or she is ready to learn. I have to accept that. I have to refrain from forming expectations about what I want them to learn and instead let the "what" come from the students. This has an extremely powerful effect. It places responsibility for learning on the student where it belongs. It removes the possibility for failure. It creates an environment in which students can form and pursue their own goals instead of a teacher's goals or a curriculum's learning objectives.

I feel like I may have digressed a little from what seems to be a straightforward question, given program and self-study, do students who engage in both make the most progress? The question is deceptive. It is interesting, if somewhat disconcerting, to think about how easily we can view and treat program-study and self-study as being separate things. When we do, how does it affect our ideas about progress and effectiveness?

Thanks, Tom, for your response. It certainly resonates with me. We don't see a hard separation between independent and facilitated learning, either. That's why we have followed learners over time regardless of whether they are in programs or not. What has surprised us is finding so many adults with basic skills needs who are trying to improve their basic skills without the support of programs and teachers. Because those who do attend programs generally stay for relatively short periods of time, we are wondering how programs might be able to stay better connected with and support them over longer periods of time.

Thanks for sharing your article about the program at SCC. It seems like it has learned many important lessons thruought its lifespan and adjusted to meet the learners' needs. I have a few questions that you and others may be able to address.

Hi, I'm Irene Paino, the GED Online Instructor for Seminole Community College. I'd like to answer your second and third questions, Julie.

Before moving a student from the classroom to Home Study, their has already been discussion between the classroom instructor and student as well as the classroom instructor and myself. I also personally meet with each student to discuss the transition and review the program with them to be sure they understand what they are signing up for. Our GED Home Study/GED Online students always have the option to visit one of our outreach centers or our computer lab if they need help and I am not available. They are given a "pass" which introduces them to the outreach instructor or lab assistant.

Given our current resources and availability, we found that we needed to stick with the higher TABE scores for students enrolling in the GED Home Study/GED Online courses. We certainly make exceptions for lower level students, so that we can serve them on a temporary basis. A recent example, was an ABE level 3 reader who was having surgery but wanted to stay connected with school. We enrolled him in Home Study and worked closely with him over the summer semester. He re-tested at the end of the semester and re-enrolled in campus classes as an ABE Level 4 reader.

Before it gets too late here on the east coast, I want thank everyone who shared their thoughts and experience about self-study and program participation. Please continue--we welcome more on this topic! In fact next week we hope to talk about another mode of self-study, GED via TV, with Molly Robertson (See article and bio below.)

Thanks so much to Steve, Clare and Lauri! If there are any more thoughts from you three, or from others, please pass them on. I would like to hear if anyone has other thoughts about program support from the top levels in terms of systemically supporting programs to address self-study as part of their operating plan. How many do this? How many are trying? What are the barriers and supports? Given what we have heard here and read in the LSAL, it seems that this is a vital way to increase our effect on adult literacy.

Over the years, what I've seen is that students who choose to study alone are often the very students who need interaction in order to gain and retain information. These are the folks who are most difficult to "talk out of" home schooling. We've had some success with them nonetheless. Online and home studies are a wonderful option for those students who are on kidney dialysis or have transportation difficulties.

Last week we talked about learner self-study in terms of the prevalence, the support porgrams can provide, and some examples, including distance education. We also recommended another article about the "GED via TV" program as another example of self-study. (see below) To follow up on this, today's FOB Article-of-the-Week is about another use of TV for adult learning, from issue 5 b:

Do adult learners benefit from educational television? Can educational television support learner leadership and help teachers position themselves as facilitators? What do viewers actually learn? What can practitioners learn from research on the impact of educational television? These and other questions guide researchers from the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, as they study what viewers learn from TV411. Created by the Adult Literacy Media Alliance (ALMA), TV411 is a national television series that aims both to reach learners not enrolled in adult basic education (ABE) classes and to enhance the education of learners enrolled in such programs.

What happens to adult students who are afraid to go to a classroom, who can't afford the gas to drive to classes, who work during the times classes are available, who have small children and no child care, or who simply have no transportation? In Indiana they can enroll in the statewide GED ON TV program. The series of 39 half-hour GED Connection television programs is broadcast throughout the state on the eight Indiana Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) channels and is carried on dozens of cable channels.

How many of you out there have incorporated some form of TV into your teaching? What were the results?

Given the low enrolment in adult literacy programs due to funding/hours/transportational barriers/lack of child care etc, and IALS survey results that showed that many adults with low literacy did not state they perceived a problem with their own literacy skills, we secured $100K from the Manitoba Lotteries Corporation to produce a ten week television series called Mathworks.

It was based on a series of videotapes that came from the Nova Scotia Coalition on Literacy in Canada. We hired a TV producer who jazzed up the content, timing, added features like MathFACTS, Math Trivia, teaching tips, "streeters" asking questions about math in real life, and authentic interviews with local shopkeepers, etc who showed how math was used in daily life. It also had an on-air hostess who "taught" basic concepts. We embedded a website URL and call to action to visit www.mathworkstv.com and/or to call our LEARN LINE phone number "for help or to help" in the television show as a bumper (little advertisement) to track how many viewers we were attracting when it ran on satellite television over the first run.

Well....the viewer numbers were staggering. The first night it ran, we had 10 calls to the LEARN line and 60 hits on the website. To make a long story short, by the time the end of the ten week run was over, a total of 60,000 people had logged onto the website (hopefully different people, not one busy person over and over!) and 66 extra calls to the LEARN line to inquire about programs. Given that only 2,200 people were enrolled in adult literacy programs across the whole province for the whole year, we were happy with the results. We did not measure the conversion factors of how many callers turned into learners (due to no funding to evaluate the project).

The TV show went on to run three more times on the satellite network SCN, because we wanted to reach the remote who did not have access to programs. I hope it worked.

We went on to convert the 10 week series into DVDs and CDs for teachers to use, tutors to try, adults to have in their homes, youth to use, and more. Many adult literacy instructors come from a Humanities background and may appreciate a bit of help with facilitating numeracy learning.

You can order them from Grassroots Press at the following link: www.literacyservices.com (Enter "Math Works TV" in the search engine.)

Marg Rose, Former Exec Director of the adult literacy coalition of Manitoba,
Canada

Thanks for sharing that story! It certainly shows how TV can reach a larger audience than classroom programs, due to the factors you mentioned and more. It would be nice to study how many viewers turned into learners or pursued further study on their own. According to Molly's studies, the GED on TV program in Indiana (US) produced 7,600 GED completers in the state! (See #1. below)

And, according to the study of the TV411 program by the Institute for Social Research, the use of programs like this can improve skills, increase participants' plans to engage in both formal study and everyday literacy activities, and encourage learners to take more of a leadership role in classroom-guided programs. (See #2. below.)

Self-Study: Broadening the Concepts of Participation and Program Support, January 22-26, 2007.

Recommended Reading (from Focus on Basics, issue 8C)

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