THE ADULT LITERACY STUDIES

Grading the reading skills of students

Before the mid-19^th century, schools in the U.S. did not group students according to grade. Students learned from books that their families had, often Bibles and hornbooks. American educator Horace Mann, who had studied the supervision, graded classes, and well-articulated classes of Prussian schools, struggled to bring those reforms to America.

It was not until 1847 that the first graded school opened in Boston with a series of books prepared for each grade. Educators found that students learn reading in steps, and they learn best with materials written for their current reading level. Since then, grouping by grades has functioned as an instructional process that continues from the first year of school through high school and beyond.

Although reading standards were set for each grade, we know that not all students in the same class read at the same level. A 7^th-grade teacher, for example can typically face a classroom of students with reading ability from the 2^nd to the 12^th grade. Good teaching practice has long separated students in the same class by reading ability for separate instruction (Betts 1946, Barr and Dreeben 1984).

Educators promoted the target reading levels for each class with the use of standardized reading tests. William A. McCall and Lelah Crabbs (1926) of the Teachers College of Columbia University published Standard Test Lessons in Reading. Revised in 1950, 1961, and 1979, these tests became an important measure of the reading ability of students in the U.S. These and later reading tests typically measure comprehension by having students first read a passage and then answer multiple-choice questions.

The Mc Call-Crabbs reading tests also became important in the development and validation of the readability formulas. Later reading tests also used for creating and testing formulas for adults and children include the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests, the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test, the California Reading Achievement Test, the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, the Diagnostic Assessment of Reading with Trial Teaching Strategies and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Grading adult readers

For a long time, no one thought of grading adults, who were considered either literate or illiterate. This began to change with the first systematic testing of adults in the U.S. military in 1917. The testing of civilians began in Chicago in 1937.

During that first period, investigators discovered that general readers in the U. S. were adults of limited reading ability. The average adult was able to read with pleasure nothing but the simplest adult materials, usually cheap fiction or graphically presented news of the day.

Educators, corporations, and government agencies responded by providing more materials at different reading levels for adults.

U.S. military literacy surveys-reading on the job

General George Washington first addressed concerns about the reading skills of fighters during the Revolutionary War. He directed chaplains at Valley Forge to teach basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic to soldiers. Since then, the U.S. armed services has invested more in studying workplace literacy than any other organization.