A Public Health Approach to Improving the Lives of Adult Learners: Introduction to the Special Issue on Adult Literacy Interventions

Abstract

Addressing the literacy needs of adult basic and secondary education learners must form a core part of a broader public health effort to increase educational and health outcomes for these individuals and their families. Adult learners constitute a significant proportion of the overall adult U.S. population and a proportion that impacts, directly and indirectly, on the physical and economic health of millions of families and society writ large. Enhancing the literacy skills of low-literate adults has proven difficult, hampered by the relative dearth of research data on struggling adult learners and effective intervention approaches, the contextual challenges of delivering intensive interventions, limited personal and systemic resources, and competing demands on learners’ time. We propose a systems-level view of adult low literacy as one that holds promise and provides a basic framework for providing coordinated, comprehensive, and integrated services but that requires additional research to support. Informed and coordinated efforts with the prekindergarten to 12th-grade education system and health and labor services sectors is needed if we are to improve the lives of these adults and their families.

Keywords:

• Adult literacy
• adult basic education
• intervention
• public health
• education

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The opinions and assertions presented in this article are those of the authors and do not purport to represent those of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institutes of Health, or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

This article not subject to US copyright law.

Notes

For a full description of the workshop discussion, please see the meeting summary posted online at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/upload/afl_workshop.pdf

The estimate of 30 million is based on performance on the prose literacy scale. The estimates are 27 and 46 million adults who performed below basic levels on document and quantitative literacy, respectively (e.g., Kutner et al., 2007).

See Sabatini et al. (this issue) for a full description of sampling and randomization procedures.