National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL)

Assessment Research Agenda

Beth Bingman
Center for Literacy Studies
Knoxville, Tennessee

What impact does participation in adult learning and literacy programs have on an adult’s life and how can this impact effectively be assessed?

The NCSALL partners at the Center for Literacy Studies (CLS) at the University of Tennessee and the College of Education at Rutgers University began working with this question. In the first year of NCSALL (the federally-funded National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy) we have been getting our research projects up and running, and beginning to get a handle on this question. It is more complex than we ever imagined!

We are currently working on four projects that we hope will help us move toward an answer. The first is a policy study that examines existing impact studies and state performance accountability projects and systems and draws implications for literacy policy and practice and for the design and methodology of future impact studies. The two papers in this study are being written by Hal Beder and Juliet Merrifield and should be available around the first of the year. The papers make clear that answering questions like, “What difference does our work make?” and “Is it working?” depends on who is asking and for what reasons as well as who is answering based on what data and what assumptions.

The second study is looking at how adult learners identify the impacts of participation in adult education in their lives. We are currently interviewing ten Tennessee adults who have been students in adult basic education. We are asking them to tell us about their lives —about their work, families, and community activities as well as their educational experiences. We plan to follow these initial interviews with interviews with another fifty adult learners from a variety of programs across the country. From these life stories we hope to be able to “hear” the differences, the impacts that adult education have had in their lives.

A third lens for looking at the larger question is that of local programs. We will be working in an action research project with a Tennessee program that is implementing the new Equipped for the Future framework as it develops new ways of monitoring the program. We have reviewed how other fields (public health, community development) measure outcomes, particularly improvement in quality of life of individuals and communities. We will be working with this literacy program to discover what can be applied to measuring changes in the lives of learners.

The NCSALL partners at Rutgers are beginning to identify the variety of teacher/learner transactions or interactions that occur in adult education classrooms. With this understanding we will be better able to know what it is that adult learners have participated in.

When we’re done, what will we have? We know for sure that we will not have the answer to our big question. But we will have more answers. And more questions. We will have looked closely at what has and hasn’t worked in previous attempts to answer these questions. We will have heard the voices of learners talking about impacts on their lives. We will have a model of looking at outcomes of adult education in the quality of learners’ lives, a model that can be used by local programs. We will have a better understanding of what is happening in adult education classrooms in order to better approach measuring the outcomes.

While I know from experience the many challenges of recruitment, teaching, and staff development, I never had any difficulty thinking about these areas of practice.

But thinking about assessment is a different matter. We began by trying to get clear on the language: inputs, outputs, outcomes, impact, indicators of program quality, performance accountability measures. We tried to find out what these mean and ended up deciding that the best we could do was to decide what we mean by them. The questions of what to assess and for what reasons need as much thinking as how to assess. Do we want to know what happened, or do we want to know did x, y, or z happen? We all want to know the impact of our work — as teachers, as learners, as program administrators, as funders. But each of us have different ways of asking the question. “Did they learn what I taught?” “What did I learn?” “How many passed the G.E.D.?” “How many got a job?” “What difference did any of this make in my life?” “What difference does any of this make in my community?” Underlying all these questions is the question of who gets to decide.

So one year into our work on impacts assessment, we are back to doing the work on our projects. We hope the research will contribute to a much bigger discussion about assessment that will help us clarify what we can say about our impact as a field.

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Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 10 (December 1997),
SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1997.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.