Measuring Change in Adult Literacy Programs: Enduring Issues and a Few Answers
Abstract
Problems in the measurement of student change in adult literacy programs were investigated through repeated testing of a group of students in Adult Basic Education and General Educational Development classes and through computer simulations. Ninety-two students were tested at three points in time with a battery of norm-referenced reading and mathematics tests as well as with tests of reading rate and decoding developed for this study. Change scores were found to vary across tests, with significant declines as well as gains. No significant differences in change scores were found for amount of instructional time or for attendance rate, and a large amount of group heterogeneity was revealed through an analysis of growth patterns. Computer simulations showed that with populations smaller than 200, aggregating grade-equivalent scores can lead to distorted mean changes when compared to aggregate means of equal-interval scale total scores. In contrast, simulations of regression to the mean caused by guessing on multiple-choice tests showed that this effect was relatively small. These results strongly support the conclusion that adult literacy programs cannot be evaluated effectively by any single measure. These findings also support the current efforts to construct multiple indicator systems for evaluating adult literacy programs, systems that attend to the multiple goals of such programs and are free of elementary-level and secondary-level conventions such as grade equivalents. © 1994, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
Publication Title
Educational Assessment
Recommended Citation
Venezky, R., Bristow, P., & Sabatini, J. (1994). Measuring Change in Adult Literacy Programs: Enduring Issues and a Few Answers. Educational Assessment, 2 (2), 101-131. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326977ea0202_1
