This indicates that the rate of improvement in Vocational Vocabulary in the integrated VOCED+VESL program was approximately 25-30 percent greater than that in either of the other two programs.

Following similar procedures for the General Reading gains gives a rate of gain of 3.21 months per 100 hours of instruction for the General ESL program, 1.24 months for the Electronics VOCED program, and 5.32 months per 100 hours of instruction for the integrated Electronics VOCED+Electronics VESL program. Thus Popham's ten week, integrated VOCED+VESL program had a gain rate per 100 hours of instruction some 65 percent higher for general reading than the general ESL program, and over 300 percent greater than the VOCED program.

Taken together, the data on Popham's ten week VESL+ VOCED program suggest that it tends to produce greater retention, greater course completion, and higher gains in learning than do the comparison courses of general ESL or a conventional electronics vocational education course. Popham also indicates that placements of his students into electronics jobs is high, almost 100 percent, and many are placed by the ninth week of the course.

Reference: This Case Study is extracted from: Sticht, T. G.; McDonald, B. A.; Erickson, P. R.(1998). Passports to Paradise: The Struggle To Teach and To Learn on the Margins of Adult Education. El Cajon, CA: Applied Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Inc., (available online at www.searchERIC.org )

Chapter 7

Three Case Studies Integrating Basic Skills Education With Job Training, Parenting, and Health Education

Case Study #3: Workplace Literacy: Integrating Job Advancement and Basic Skills Education.

In R & D for the U. S. Navy I directed a team which developed new on-duty basic skills programs in reading and mathematics. At the time the project was initiated, the Navy was funding a community college to deliver a three week, 3 hours a day (45 hours) on-duty course of instruction in reading and another course in mathematics for personnel who were in need of reading and/or mathematics instruction in the 5th through 12th grade levels. The goal was to improve personnel chances of studying and passing correspondence materials for advancement to higher ranks of responsibility and pay.

The community college was using general purpose materials for teaching reading, and mathematics. While the programs made some gains on standardized tests of reading or mathematics, they were not demonstrating improvements in job-related reading or mathematics. Navy management wanted to provide job-related reading and mathematics as a means of more closely linking instruction to requirements for job advancement.

Literacy and Numeracy Task Analysis. To develop a new functional context education reading program, we first conducted studies of what kinds of tasks Navy personnel performed using reading in job training and on the job. In this research, students, instructors, and job performers in ten Navy jobs were interviewed and asked for information two major types of reading tasks: reading-to-do and reading-to-learn. In a reading-to-do task, the person is performing some job task, needs some information from a document, looks-up the information, holds it in working memory long enough to apply it, and can then forget it. In a reading-to-learn task, the person reads information to be stored in long-term memory as part of their knowledge base, and then retrieves it (or a reconstruction of it) for use at some later time, such as taking an end of week test, or for a performing a task on the job.