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Transcript for presentation by Dr. Larry Condelli, American Institutes for Research

Overview of the Changing the Odds: Informing Policy with Research on How Adult Learners Succeed Symposium

LARRY CONDELLI: Thank you very much, Mariann, and it’s indeed a pleasure to be here back in California. I think I grew up in California. I don’t know where you grow up exactly but I lived here about 25 years in Southern California and also in Santa Cruz. I always feel I am a Californian even though I’ve lived long outside of California. So it’s great to be back and especially among such a great group here of I think the adult literacy stars in California.

I’m going to talk about some of the work that AIR does just very briefly in adult literacy but I really want to focus on a symposium that we held last month which we called, “Changing the Odds” which I think has some relevance. It definitely has some direct relevance to what I think we’re going to talk about today and some of the themes that came out of that symposium we’ll see all day long with the different presenters.

Just a word about AIR. We are a large non-profit research group in Washington although we do also have offices in Sacramento and Palo Alto. We have a small group of very committed and dedicated adult literacy and adult education staff that are professional developers and researchers and we have all fairly good long careers in adult literacy and we’re very committed to doing adult literacy.

You, of course, are aware of our CALPRO project but let me tell you a little bit about the other projects we have. Our work really falls into two areas: one of training and technical assistance and one of research. We have a new project we’re just beginning called, “Supporting Teacher Quality,” what we call a Teaching Excellence in Adult Literacy (TEAL) Center, and recently we thought that we will be starting up for the next three years, and we’re going to focus on providing training on improving writing instruction and adult education.

We have, course the infamous National Reporting System, a support that was that was developed partly by AIR in cooperation with OVAE, and we provide technical assistance and training on data systems and other things.

In the past, we just recently had a project on developing content standards and supporting adult and rural states. On the research side, we have mostly been working with ESL. We run two very large adult ESL studies looking at the impact of instruction on literacy level ESL learners. One that was completed level about four or five years ago called the “What Works Study” and one we’re just finishing called the “Literacy Impact Study” and you’ll be hearing about that I hope later this year as we prepare for final report.

We’re also doing a project in the transition area looking at ESL learners transitioning from ESL into ABE. We’re not really going to talk about that today but that is a project that’s ongoing. We’re looking at 10 models across the country to help get ideas that will improve that transition.

In the past we have also worked in the adult literacy. We’re very much active in the adult literacy. We’ve really stayed out of the policy arena and thought that that would be something good for us to do, to sort of take this knowledge, keep people in the field together and develop some ideas for improving adult literacy and improving adult education in several ways and we thought this was a really good opportunity and a really good time to do that as probably you know the Workforce Investment Act, the law that regulates adult education, has actually been expired for a number of years really but is coming up for reauthorization soon, we hope.

There are two bills in the Congress right now. One in the Senate and one in the House to reauthorize adult education so we know there are discussions going on about that. What is also new Administration, as you know, new people and new opportunities we think and new attention being paid and renewed attention, we think to adult literacy. We’ll hear more about that from Brenda, I’m sure. So because of that, we thought this was a really good time for us to get involved and try to make a difference.

We can develop a symposium we called “Changing the Odds.” Changing the Odds comes from a book that’s currently popular right now from Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers and that book-- I don’t know if any of you have read it or are familiar with it-- but what Malcolm Gladwell does in that book is he looks at exceptional people, ranging from Bill Gates, to the Beetles, to his mother on: How did they succeed? How did they get where they are? How did they become great people? How did they achieve great things? His conclusion is that hard work and talent are really necessary. You’ve got to work hard. You’ve got to have some skill in a particular area but what really makes a difference is when the circumstances and the environment that that person is working in is conducive to helping them.

So you can’t just … hard work and talent alone are not enough. You need people helping you, you need an environment that helps you. You need a situation that helps you thrive and improve. (And he goes through a number of case studies -- it really is an interesting book if you want to look at it.) So we thought – we took this theme and we applied it to adult learners. We thought what can we do? What kind of policy changes can we make? What kind of programmatic investments can we make that will change these odds and help adult learners that will create an environment, basically program and instructional approaches that will help them thrive and achieve the things that they want to achieve in their lives.

So that was the idea behind the symposium. We invited a number of people from all different kinds of areas. We didn’t just stick to adult literacy: we wanted to make it multidisciplinary. We invited people from labor, from community colleges, from employers, teachers, policy makers from the government, foundations..people from foundations… and so we had a very broad, multidisciplinary audience. We also had some people from the general public that we invited in.

And the format of the symposium was that we had three panels. We have two or three speakers on each panel who presented some ideas of the larger of the group audience, which was of about 60 people, discussed those ideas and came back to the presenters, asked questions and generated a discussion and additional ideas around these topics.

We had three panels. One was on achieving postsecondary success. The other was on Innovative 21st Century program models. What are some new models we should be looking at or thinking about in adult literacy? We had another panel that looked at the changing demographics or markets within adult literacy. So what are the trends in the future that again are going to affect our services? What kind of …what’s the immigration pattern …the aging patterns of our student population that we serve, and how can we adapt adult learners to meet these changes in demographics?

Of course, the panel that I’m going to talk about today has the most relevance to us is achieving postsecondary success. Much of the discussion there was on transitions of adult literacy learners into community college.

I’m going to spend a couple of minutes talking about that panel and what we concluded. I think that you will see that some of these things will recur. We had two speakers on this panel. One was the President of the Community College of the District of Columbia. His name is Jonathan Guevara, and he talked about remedial education, how it is not serving the learners that he sees that come into his program., where the adult learners that move into community college, former adult learners. That they languish-as I’m sure most of us have experienced—languish, they spend too much time there, they get discouraged, they spend up all of their Pell money and time on remedial education, without really getting anywhere. And he was actually very critical of remedial education in his policy, in general, as well. He stressed the need to accelerate learning and to change how community colleges deal with these students to accommodate different issues, as right now, looking at these learners, it doesn’t really accommodate the special needs of adult learners.

Our second speaker was Judy Taylor. She’s from an organization called “Jobs for the Future” and Judy is running a project that you may have heard about called “Breaking Through”, and what “Breaking Through” is funded by the Carnegie Foundation and it’s giving grants to community colleges to develop innovative models to help the former adult learners and make that transition in community college. There are about 20 or 25 colleges that are doing this, trying different models and have gotten grants and I believe that’s ongoing for the last two years. She just completed an evaluation so we’re really fortunate to see the first look at some of the data she’s looked at. She looked at the programs where learners were really succeeding and what was helping that.

These were the four things that she sees, in the slide. The four things that really seem to help learners who are transitioning was to accelerate the pace of learning; that they really needed to go at a faster pace at the model of taking semester-long courses and going on doesn’t serve adult literacy students very well because they just don’t have the time and resources to spend. Support services were critical, so helping them with other things besides this, that will help enable them to seek transportation, child care, also counseling. What are the right courses to take and what are their career goals? Those are very important. And finally, the last two points were/have to do with goals and milestones. The program that gave students milestones-- that showed clear payoffs for what they were doing for the classes they were taking; the successes they would achieve; to see clear connection with what their goals were--were more successful with their students than those that did not have those. So if they were certificates as you go along the way, or a clear pathway and goal so take this and then I’ll take that and that and then I’ll succeed. Those things will really help learners. It’s having those goals, having pathways and of course connections to jobs. What am I doing? How does it connect with a job?

So it is a very interesting panel, so then we had a discussion, as I said, with the general audience, and some of these other things you’ll see on the slide were brought up. I think I summarized here the six key items. The first four had to do with programmatic changes that they thought were needed in community college and adult lliteracy programs to help students make those transitions, to make them more contextualized and align them more.

We are very fragmented from all different directions. There needs to be more contextualization, more alignment in the program, contextualization meaning showing a connection to their goals and to real-life activities. There had to be more access points, multiple access points, better access points among learners so that help for adults come in different directions and get into the system in different ways and by more study was recommended and needed in the demonstration project about how do students come into the system and what will help that access.

Innovative models was brought up. We need new approaches, we need new ways of looking at transition and a lot of talk about technology, using existing technology – the Internet. Types of learning that can be provided that the students can do on their own time. And the last two things had more to do with administrative issues. We need outcome data on these students. We don’t really know, or have a way to know, if we are succeeding or not. There’s no uniform way to track the students and look at what they are achieving or even really clearly define what these outcomes are. You have… basically you enter and you get your degree or not, and that’s really not sufficient to track and understand what’s going on and make improvements.

Finally, there’s in any change that you make in any instructional setting we need professional development. The teachers need to know about the students and be trained on the new approaches.

Just a quick summary: I’ll summarize all of these things I think came out in the discussions. Now that we’ve talked about all of this, how do we put this into action and make it real? Definitely, if there was a consensus among our audience and our panel members that there needs to be an improved approach to remedial and developmental education that educators need to think about. What are we training students to do? What do we want them to do? What do they want to do? To go beyond just getting GED or just getting a degree that had to be more modulized and more clearly defined. There’s definitely a lack of assessment that can be used with our population. We don’t have discipline particularly on the adult ed. side. We have limited tests that don’t really measure steps of progress that make to succeed.

Of course, again, technology comes up. There needs to be more use of technology and more modulized instruction so that to accommodate adult learners’ situations and needs where they don’t have necessarily extended periods of time that they college students in a traditional sense, that you can take just little pieces of at a time.

Short-term milestones was brought up a lot, as I mentioned earlier. People have to feel like they have a goal and reach that goal. Sometimes getting a degree or a GED that’s a very long term goal that’s difficult to achieve for maybe someone who comes from a low level and has a relatively long way to go. Building in these milestones, you’ll probably hear of some approaches in some other presentations today: readiness certificates, stackable certificates and, definitely, a pathways approach. Better assessment, as I said and student aid, of course, finances. How do you pay for all of this? Some changes in financial aid to help adult students.

In conclusion, I just want to tell you what we are going to do next with our findings from our symposium. There were three panels; I just told you about one panel. Each panel is writing a very short paper, five, six pages. We’re going to put those online and online discussion community where we will not only have all of the papers, we’ll have the opportunity for people to react to them, to expand on them, and to what we really hope is to broaden this conversation beyond the 65-70 people that were there and participating currently to a much broader national audience.

We hope that to present some of findings and papers to people in Congress. We have already delivered to Congressional staffers some summaries of what we’ve discussed and we hope to be able to continue to do what federal conversation on adult literacy and foundations and other funding agencies, private research initiatives, and what we really hope in the end is that we are successful, that we do create a better adult education system, that we’re really changing the odds for our learners and help them succeed. So I’m going to turn that over to our next speaker, and I hope and wish you a great conference, and I hope we see some more discussion around themes later on today. Thank you very much.

















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Dr. Larry Condelli, American Institutes for Research Page 5



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