This developmental progression of the person occurs as the result of active, constructive information processing activities that represent and re-represent knowledge to forge new learning from old. The new knowledge adds to the knowledge base in the long term memory and is activated in various contexts through constructive processes that are sensitive to the different contexts. This means, for instance, that even though one possesses certain knowledge and skills, they may not be accessed if the context in which the person is immersed does not activate them.

In the Compendium, this cognitive science framework of a human cognitive system, developmental model of literacy, and an information processing approach to learning, is used to reinterpret and summarize the large body of data concerned with the assessment of literacy over the last 75 years.

What Makes People Highly Literate?

If, as indicated earlier, the long term memory must possess vast bodies of knowledge and if high levels of information processing skills in working memory are needed to be highly literate, then how do the highly literate acquire this knowledge and skill?

Quantitative data from assessments of adult literacy in 1937,1973, and 1986 (see pages 43,63, and 99 in this Compendium) suggest what might be called the "triple helix" of literacy development: skill, practice, and education. A salient finding across the last half century is that people with higher levels of education have higher levels of literacy skill and they engage in higher levels of literacy practices, i.e., they read books, magazines and newspapers more frequently than do the less educated and less skilled.

The data on the intergenerational transfer of literacy in Part II shows that better educated parents tend to have children who achieve better in school. A considerable body of evidence indicates that preschool children from homes that have higher income levels and where parents have higher education levels frequently acquire considerable oral language vocabulary and literacy knowledge before they enter school (see chapters by Mason & Kerr and Diana Slaughter-Defoe in Sticht, Beeler, & McDonald, 1992). These children have typically engaged in some forms of literacy practices, such as scribbling with pencils and crayons as "pre-writing", and perhaps they have even learned to print their names and other words. They may have been read to and developed knowledge of the "sound of printed language." They may have learned the alphabet and even how to read simple stories.

As children who have engaged in pre-school literacy practices and developed pre-school literacy skill enter school, they tend to do better in school, and the school directs their reading into areas that they might not engage in otherwise. As children and other people read more and more widely, they develop higher levels of information processing skills involved in recognizing printed words and other features of the written language, and they learn the meanings of more and more words, i.e., they develop more extensive bodies of knowledge. This in turn helps them do well in school, so they pursue further education. This guides them to engage in additional reading practices, and, in turn this helps them develop more efficient reading skills and helps them acquire more knowledge.

This scenario suggests that while higher levels of skill, education and practice typically go together, it is possible to develop high levels of literacy through the engagement in high levels of practice, without attending formal education for very long. This may have been illustrated in the World War I assessment of "intelligence." The fact that officers with very few years of education scored quite high on the Alpha test of "intelligence" for literates, was interpreted by the military psychologists of the time to indicate that the test measured "innate intelligence." But it seems likely that what made it possible for the unschooled officers to score fairly high on the Alpha was the knowledge and information processing skill they had acquired, perhaps by doing considerable independent reading (see pages 19 - 24 for a discussion of the Alpha and Beta tests and examples of the items on each of these tests).