Two reading assessments for youth in alternative basic skills and livelihood skills training programs

This article describes two assessment tools that have been used to assess the reading skills of youth participating in alternative basic skills and livelihood skills training programs. The Rapid Assessment of Reading Skills (RARS) was developed to identify potential participants who needed to improve their reading skills before beginning training and to assign them to the proper level of basic reading instruction. The Out-of-School Literacy Assessment incorporates RARS into a more complex impact evaluation tool. Both assessment tools can also be used to inform program design, define benchmarks, and assess impact.     

Developmental skills of advantaged and disadvantaged children on perceptual tasks

The Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test (BVMGT), Rutgers Drawing Test (RDT), Memory-for-Designs (M-F-D), a visuo-spatial memory test (Bannatyne, 1968), and selected motor tasks (Bannatyne, 1965) were administered to 155 advantaged and disadvantaged children. First- and second-grade advantaged children were superior on all of the visual-motor, visual-motor memory, and visual memory, and visual memory tasks. On the motor tasks, first-grade advantaged children were superior on Gross Rhythm (p < .01), and Throws (p < .01). Second-grade advantaged children were superior on Crosses (p < .01), and Throws (p < .01). Disadvantaged first- and second-graders, however, were superior on Touchings (p < .01). The results are discussed in terms of differential perceptual-motor and motor growth and the need to structure educational experience that will contribute to this growth.     

Work, skills development for employability and education for sustainable development

This article focuses on the radical changes taking place in skills development for work and life, and their implications for the content of education and schooling. It examines skills development for employability and workforce education, with particular reference to technical and vocational education and training (TVET). In turn, it is argued that the impact of these issues upon the world of work will be reflected in those education reform initiatives that will become necessary to keep pace with such institutionalized change. This was a keynote presentation by Rupert Maclean at the APERA Conference and draws heavily on the chapter by Victor Ordonez and Rupert Maclean ‘Seeking a New Education Paradigm for Teaching and Learning to Meet the Changing Needs of Education for All and skills Development for Work and Life‘ in the book ‘Learning and Teaching for the Twenty-first Century: Festschrift for Professor Phillip Hughes’, Rupert Maclean (Editor), Springer Academic Publishers (forthcoming). The authors thank UNESCO-UNVOC consultant Professor David Wilson for his valuable inputs to this paper and to the keynote presentation.     

Improving computer skills of socially disadvantaged adolescents: Same-age versus cross-age tutoring

In a voluntary tutor-based training program, socially disadvantaged adolescents acquired basic computer skills. Two training groups were compared: one group was instructed by adolescents, the other by adults. Both groups achieved comparable results in a final test. The tutees' learning results did not differ with respect to their initial knowledge, gender, school type, or socio-economic status, nor did these factors interact with the training group. We identified a significant interaction between the tutees' immigration status and training group. These results are interpreted on the basis of (1) the tutees' attitudes towards adolescent and adult teachers, and (2) the instructional styles of adolescent and adult tutors. Finally, the adolescents' self-esteem increased throughout the program.     

Literacy and life skills education for vulnerable youth: What policy makers can do

In countries with a high concentration of youth with low literacy levels, the policy and programming task related to education and training is particularly daunting. This note briefly presents policies and practices which have been put in place to provide vulnerable youth with literacy and life skills education. It is based on a multi-country research study undertaken by the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) in cooperation with the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada (DFATD Canada; previously Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA), and on subsequent policy dialogue forums with policy makers, practitioners, researchers and youth representatives held in Africa, the Arab region and Asia. Built on this review of existing policies and their implementation, this note provides lessons for innovative practices and suggests six concrete ways to address the needs of vulnerable youth through literacy and life skills education.     

Adolescents' development of skills for agency in youth programs: learning to think strategically

This research examines how youth in arts and leadership programs develop skills for organizing actions over time to achieve goals. Ethnically diverse youth (ages 13-21) in 11 high-quality urban and rural programs were interviewed as they carried out projects. Qualitative analyses of 712 interviews with 108 youth yielded preliminary grounded theory about youth's development of strategic thinking, defined as use of dynamic systems reasoning to anticipate real-word scenarios and plan work. Strategic thinking appeared to develop through youth's creative engagement with tactical challenges in the work and feedback from the work's outcomes. Program advisors supported this development by giving youth control and by providing nondirective assistance when needed.     

Massification of higher education and youth transition: skills mismatch,informal sector jobs and implications for China

This study adopts a nationwide survey data set between 2005 and 2013 (Chinese General Social Survey) to explore the influence of the massification of higher education on the transition of Chinese youth into the labour market. Data analysis reveals two major findings. First, the economic returns to college education of recent cohorts of university graduates (those who have graduated from universities not more than 3 years ago) are lower than the cohorts who graduated in 2005 and 2006. Second, recent cohorts of college graduates are likely to work in the urban informal sector, unlike their senior counterparts. These findings could partially be explained by skills mismatch in the labour market but a comprehensive understanding of graduate unemployment in China could be obtained by bringing the broader political economy perspective into the analysis.     

Story writing skills of adults with a history language-impairment

The purpose of this study was to investigate the story writing skills of adults with a history of oral language impairment. It was hypothesized that writing text would pose difficulty for adults with a history of language impairment (LI), and that this difficulty would manifest itself as reduced grammatical complexity and increased errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation. The story writing of 10 adults with a history of LI was compared to a group of 51 unimpaired individuals. Participants were asked to write the story of Cinderella. Stories were analysed for length, grammatical complexity and accuracy of grammar, punctuation and spelling. Data were analysed to determine group trends as well as individual profiles. As a group, the adults with LI showed no difference from the comparison group in the length of their stories as measured by total number of words. The LI group did, however, show reduced grammatical complexity in their writing, as measured by mean length of t-unit. The LI group made more errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation than the comparison group. Individual analyses indicated substantial variability within the LI group. It is concluded that LI in childhood is associated with writing difficulties in adulthood.     

Reconstructing teacher education for disadvantaged communities

Can teacher education be reconstructed to help teachers acquire the knowledge and skills they need to teach disadvantaged populations as proposed by new theories of learning? What shape should this type of teacher education take? After making a case for a transformative teacher education, responsive to current thinking in teaching and learning, I present two instances of school-based approaches to educating teachers that incorporate elements of constructivist, cognitive, and developmental theory when teaching poor rural children. I discuss these cases vis-à-vis their reach and potential for the future of teacher education.     

Spelling in adults: The role of reading skills and experience

One hundred university students completed tests of spellingproduction, vocabulary, reading comprehension, readingexperience, and reading accuracy (ability to distinguish apreviously read word from a similar distractor). Readingexperience, as measured by an adaptation of the AuthorRecognition Test, and reading accuracy contributed to theprediction of spelling beyond the joint contribution of readingcomprehension and vocabulary. The results are more consistentwith a uni-process model of spelling based on the quality ofword-specific orthographic learning, rather than with a dual-process account relying on both word-specific knowledge andrules.     

The effects of the use of activities of sapa on the oral communication skills of disadvantaged kindergarten children

The study investigated the effects of participation in the activities of Science-A Process Approach (SAPA) on the oral communication skills of disadvantaged kindergarten children. Experimental-control group, pretest-posttest research design was employed. The investigator designed the Test of Oral Communication Skills (TOCS) to measure students' oral communication skills. Two experimental groups (one morning and one afternoon, N = 52) and two control groups (one morning and one afternoon, N = 48) were randomly assigned from two kindergarten classrooms (morning and afternoon classes in each) in an inner-city school in Columbus, Ohio. The investigator provided the science instruction to all students. Experimental subjects received 22 half-hour lessons from exercises a through k of Part A, SAPA. Control subjects received 22 lessons from Springboards to Science, a teacher demonstration, class discussion type of kindergarten curricuoum used in the school system. The treatment period spanned 12 academic weeks. Analysis of variance of TOCS pretest scores showed no significant differences among any of the means of the four groups. Analysis of covariance of TOCS posttest scores revealed differences significant at .05 or beyond in the mean scores of the experimental groups and control groups for total oral and total receiving skills and for six of the eight subskills measured by TOCS. Application of the Tukey (b) test revealed that experimental group mean scores exceeded control group mean scores in every TOCS skill and subskill area and that in total oral transmitting subskills both experimental group mean scores were significantly greater at .05 level or beyond than corresponding mean scores for both control groups. Within the parameters of this study, it may be concluded that when the activities and teaching strategies of SAPA curriculum are presented to disadvantaged kindergarten children, their oral communication skills, especially the transmitting (speaking) skills, are clearly enhanced.