Introduction to Special Series: Adults With Low Academic Skills

Description of Special Series

In this special series, we present a compendium of pioneering studies on a targeted population: adults in the United States who have difficulties with reading (decoding and comprehension) and writing skills. The topics covered are important within the field of child and adolescent learning but have received little attention in adult literacy scholarship. Although there is no clear theoretical framework that unites these studies, they represent important work that we hope will spur future research on the various topics so that a theoretical framework can eventually evolve.

The order of the studies is organized by population. Two of the studies (Choo et al. and Tighe et al.) focus on adults who attend literacy programs and on average read at elementary education levels. The first (Choo et al.) of these two papers addresses the prevalence of stuttering among adults who attend literacy programs, and the relationship between this phenomenon and reading-related skills. The second (Tighe et al.) uses eye-tracking data to examine whether online comprehension monitoring contributes unique variance to reading comprehension ability. These studies are unique as there are no other known published research studies with adults with low skills on either topic. The remaining three papers (Magliano et al.; Seipel et al.; and Traga Philippakos et al.) focus on readers and writers with low skills in postsecondary education institutions and report on the relationship between thresholds in foundational skills and reading comprehension (Magliano et al.), the validity and reliability of a diagnostic reading comprehension test (Seipel et al.), and the validity of a writing motivation measure (Traga Philippakos et al.). These three studies suggest important implications for college students with reading difficulties, as the work provides evidence that, compared with typically performing postsecondary students, they often do not have strong foundational literacy skills, have difficulty generating causal inferences, and have higher motivational beliefs about the mechanics of writing. All of these problems can seriously impede reading competence and thus academic achievement.

Summary of the Work Reported

Although a handful of researchers have investigated the oral language skills of adults who attend literacy programs, to the best of our knowledge, Choo et al. are the first to examine the relationship between stuttering and reading among adults who attend adult literacy programs. Their findings of a prevalence of stuttering in their sample that is higher than in the general population are somewhat unexpected. This suggests that screening for stuttering in this population may be warranted and that oral reading assessments may not accurately reflect the ability of adults with low literacy who also stutter. In addition, the lower correlations between reading and related skills for those who stutter points to a pattern of uneven ability among adults who have low literacy skills and who stutter. The authors of this paper argue that replication studies are needed, as well as research that explores whether capturing the oral disfluencies of adults who have low literacy skills has instructional implications.

In the second article in the issue, Tighe et al. use eye-tracking data to examine whether online monitoring of reading comprehension contributes unique variance, beyond decoding, oral language, working memory and age, to two reading comprehension measures as well as a verbal measure of offline comprehension monitoring. In their sample of adults with low literacy skills who were recruited primarily from adult literacy classes, Tighe et al. found that online comprehension monitoring was uniquely predictive of passage-specific comprehension but did not generalize to a norm-referenced comprehension assessment. Furthermore, it was found that decoding and oral vocabulary were the most salient predictors of the norm-referenced comprehension assessment. In addition, one eye-movement measure of online comprehension monitoring—regression path duration—uniquely predicted offline comprehension monitoring, such that adults with longer regression path durations were better at explaining key information presented in the texts. Their study suggests how eye-tracking can provide nuanced information of how adults with reading difficulties engage with text as well as how offline comprehension monitoring data can augment information learned from online comprehension monitoring assessments. One future direction of this work might be to investigate whether the results are similar for adult literacy learners who are diagnosed with disabilities compared with those who are not.

In the first of three papers that focus on readers and writers with low skills in postsecondary education institutions, Magliano et al. discuss how some postsecondary students may have difficulty understanding college-level text because they have skills below a threshold of proficiency in the component skills of reading. In their sample, the research team identified thresholds in the students’ foundational skills associated with word-, sentence-, and discourse-level processing. Students performing below these thresholds were found to be disproportionately attending developmental education classes and demonstrated lower reading strategy scores than students above the threshold. The authors conclude that a proportion of students in developmental education programs do not have adequate foundational reading skills to support the strategies necessary to comprehend postsecondary text, which in turn affects their potential for academic achievement. The study underscores the need to identify the strengths and challenges of students needing institutional support for college success. Some students may need support with foundational skills of reading, whereas others may not, and as such, providing the same level of support would be inappropriate. Future research based on this work may attempt to determine the extent to which students who fall below the established foundational reading thresholds may have learning disabilities that have impeded reading development, possibly since childhood.

In the following article, Seipel et al. report that a sizable number of postsecondary students have difficulty understanding what they read, and through their MOCCA-College study the researchers try to explore the nature of the students’ difficulties. Using a new assessment tool, the investigators describe how postsecondary students with good versus poor reading comprehension differ with regard to demographics, cognitive processes, and underlying reading skills that contribute to their understanding of text. Study results indicate initial support for the value of the assessment tool as a diagnostic instrument to identify postsecondary students who have difficulty with reading comprehension, specifically concerning the ability to generate causal inferences while reading. More research is needed to indicate whether the MOCCA-College assessment could be used to differentiate instruction, create interventions, and provide individualized feedback based on a student’s results and inferencing patterns.

Despite the important relationship between reading and writing skills, writing is a neglected area of research in adults who have difficulty with reading (Nielsen, 2015). In the final study, Traga Philippakos et al. validated a measure of writing motivation to examine the relationship of motivational constructs to writing quality of postsecondary students attending basic writing classes and students in typical first-year composition courses. Results indicated statistically significant differences between the two groups on self-efficacy for grammar and strategies, and on beliefs about both the substance and mechanics of writing. Positive relationships were found between writing quality and self-efficacy, as well as the belief in the importance of substance in writing. A negative relationship was found between writing quality and avoidance goals, as well as the belief in the importance of mechanics. This work confirms previous findings that low-performing college writers place emphasis on mechanics compared with substance, suggesting that these individuals are somewhat unclear on “what matters” in writing. The study offers a questionnaire that could be used prior to instruction to examine adult students’ level of motivation to help address instructional needs. It is also suggested that the measure could be administered postinstruction to examine changes in students’ writing motivation that may be attributed to the instruction.

Conclusion

This special series highlights the spectrum of adults who have low literacy skills, ranging from adults who attend adult literacy programs to those enrolled in postsecondary settings. The specific articles point to the diversity of the needs these adults possess, including attention to speaking, decoding, comprehending, and writing skills. The authors share groundbreaking work by exploring the prevalence of stuttering (Choo et al.), using new tools (Tighe et al.), applying a new model (Magliano et al.), and developing new measures (Traga Philippakos et al. and Seipel et al.) in a field that has a paucity of research. We hope that readers new to this field will consider expanding their research populations to include adults who have difficulty with literacy skills. One area that is prime for research is the connection between learning disabilities and the participants of this special series. The participants in these studies attended adult and postsecondary developmental education programs and may or may not have been diagnosed with a learning disability. The topic of learning disability among this targeted population is an intriguing one (Patterson, 2020). Unfortunately, participants in existing reading research with adults typically do not have official diagnostic documentation, and therefore researchers need to rely on self-report (e.g., Strucker et al., 2007). However, we speculate that, consistent with other studies on adults who have low literacy skills (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1997), many of this special series’ participants exhibit patterns of performance consistent with a diagnosis of learning disability. Further research is greatly needed to understand whether (a) the types of adults who participated in these studies would fit the criteria of a learning disability and (b) this diagnosis would have different implications for instruction and assessment for this group versus those who do not fit the criteria for a learning disability diagnosis.