Monica Friday
Mrs. M. Kelly
EDU362: Adult Learning & Instruction
April 26, 2012
I chose to write about adult literacy. This is a very serious subject that affects more people that we realize. Literacy is the ability to read, write, compute, and use technology at a level that enables an individual to reach his or her full potential as a parent, employee, and community member. There are many programs that helps can assist with literacy. One program is the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). This program is a nationally representative assessment of English literacy among American adults age 16 and older. In 2003, over 19,000 adults participated in the national and state-level assessments, representing the entire population of U.S. adults who are age 16. The NAAL is designed to measure functional English Literacy. Those measures are broken into three types of literacy programs Prose, Document, and Quantitative. This is because adults use different types of written and printed materials in their daily lives. The Prose literacy program is the knowledge and skills needed to perform prose tasks, (i.e., to search, comprehend, and use continuous texts). The Document literacy program is the knowledge and skills needed to perform document tasks, (i.e., to search, comprehend, and use non-continuous texts in various formats). And the Quantitative literacy program the knowledge and skills required to perform quantitative tasks, (i.e., to identify and perform computations, either alone or sequentially, using numbers embedded in printed materials). Adult literacy is much deeper than many people know about and it reflects on all level. Adult learning and education including literacy ties in with David Kolb’s learning styles model and experiential learning theory. Kolb 's learning theory sets out four distinct learning styles (or preferences), which are based on a four-stage learning cycle. Regardless of the learning styles in order
References: http://academic.regis.edu/ed205/Kolb.pdf http://nces.ed.gov/naal/literacytypes.asp www.edvantia.org/pdta/pdf/Effective_Instructional_Strategies.pdf http://www.proliteracy.org/page.aspx?pid=345