Improving Adult Literacy Outcomes: Lessons from Cognitive Research for Developing Countries. Directions in Development.
Despite the existence of about one billion illiterates in the world, adult literacy programs make up 1-5 percent of government or donor budgets, and they remain severely underfunded in comparison to primary education. Though dropout and course completion rates improved in the 1990s, the outcomes of literacy instruction are still modest and may have improved little since the 1970s. The results may disappoint governments and donors who expect that once taught, people will have usable skills and remain literate. The modest results make it hard to increase coverage and to argue for increased expenditures for this sector. The results may be due to inefficient instruction but also to the structure of human memory, which has important implications for adult literacy acquisition. The need to learn the rapid recognition of complex patterns poses problems that are not apparent to people who became expert readers in their childhood.
Correlation Between Limited Education and Transfer of Learning
One of the greatest challenges in designing applications for developing communities is that potential users may have little or no education. We investigate how limited education correlates with cognitive skills for conceptual abstraction, as required for transfer of learning in video-based skills training. Through a controlled experiment we compared 56 participants from low-income communities in India, split into two groups of 28, based on scores of a textual literacy assessment tool. Group A included participants who passed the test cut-off condition; Group B included those who did not. Participants were then rated for their ability to generalize video instructions on how to use a vacuum cleaner to similar, but not necessarily identical, tasks. Results confirmed that: 1) Both groups faced challenges when a skill required generalization from instructional material; 2) Group A performed better than Group B all-around on this learning task; 3) Diversification of examples within instructions helped Group A participants in transfer of learning, but not Group B participants. We conclude with design recommendations for instructional videos for populations with limited education.
Science fairs as learning tool for teaching excellence
Science fairs are usually considered to be a pedagogical and cultural activity that involves the students actively. Gifted students need challenges to further develop their skills while maintaining the motivation level. Science fairs may provide the informal environment that will request and allow these students of excellence to challenge themselves by developing a scientific research project. Despite being well known in different countries, in Portugal first steps are being made on the use and implementation of science fairs as effective pedagogical tool. In this work, we will present a 4 years study that was developed on a Portuguese school with the main goal of evaluating the advantages of this informal way of teaching. The study includes an analysis of the evolution of the students’ knowledge that have participated, or visited, the different science fairs. Some advices for the implementation of these projects will be given. The motivation of the students was monitored as well as the knowledge and skills effectively improved by this activity.