THE ADULT LITERACY STUDIES
Grading the reading skills of students
Before the mid-19th 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 7th-grade teacher, for
example can typically face a classroom of students with reading ability from the
2nd to the 12th 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.
|