Adult Literacy programs struggle to provide effective instruction for adults seeking their services. A growing convergence of research findings reveals how to improve instruction with children and adolescents. We propose to extend the knowledge garnered with these younger populations to addressing adults' needs. Our goal is to validate instructional interventions appropriate for adults with limited literacy proficiency. Our application offers a multi-disciplinary, systematic, and programmatic research plan with three aims. First, we will research what component skills for reading are incorporated within common assessments of literacy (CASAS, NAAL, and GED). This will aid in the design of effective adult interventions and give us the necessary information to explicate an intervention model linking the relationship of reading components and interventions to global adult literacy outcomes. Our group has extensive success improving children and youth literacy and, more recently, in adult education settings. We will adapt our interventions to the adult learner and adults' instructional settings. Second, we will select appropriate interventions based on our Aim 1 findings and rigorously test these interventions with adults under well-controlled conditions. We are specifically interested in enhancing performance on the component reading skills of word analysis, fluency, and reading comprehension. We predict that these skills will be closely related to gains on adult literacy measures.
Our final aim addresses the significant issue of successfully translating research findings into practice in more typical settings. More specifically, these studies will examine how effective these interventions are on learners' outcomes when the research controls and supports are reduced from what was available in the previous studies.
