Parallel Experiences at the K-12 Level
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Parallel Experiences at the K-12 Level
Hopefully everyone participating in this discussion regarding adult literacy is aware that almost everything you are saying applies to the results for students in school as well. Coming from a public school background you could always see the effect that high mobility rates had on overall student results. Schools with those highest rates almost always struggled to meet standard on state measures connected to NCLB. This was the case with overall populations as well as various subgroups that were tested. The same applies to student retention, or for that matter attendance. As a rule, student who attended regularly achieved much higher grades than students whose attendance was far less consistent. This then followed suit with results on standardized testing and ultimately on graduation rates.
The entire education community, whether it is involved with adult literacy, or the traditional K-12 curriculum is faced with the same thing. The key to increasing literacy and to closing achievement gaps starts with getting and retaining students.
Fred Lowenbach
Fred,
I certainly agree that K-12 education has retention issues related to mobility; however, the difference as I see it is twofold. First of all, most schools run on a 180 cycle and children are expected to attend every day that they’re healthy and reside in the district. Secondly, while an individual teacher may structure his/her instructional segments, most students don’t have the ability to choose whether or not to attend a given session. I suspect that the attendance issue in K-12 – at least up until 9th or 10th grade – is related to the family’s mobility rather than to student motivation.
Most adult education programs in Pennsylvania, have an average attendance of 60 to 100 hours per year. Mobility is certainly a factor, but in my experience most adults “stop out” for many reasons other than mobility. As a program director, I have tried various combinations of intensity and duration. One of the ways we’ve worked on retention is to have each teacher create a scattergram of his/her retention patterns. One axis of the graph is the number of hours available, the other axis is the duration of the class. What we found is that different patterns emerge on the scattergram with different teachers. We then work with teachers individually to develop improvement strategies based on their individual patterns. For example, a teacher with students who cluster in the low intensity/low duration quadrant would use very different retention strategies than a teacher who has students clustering in the low intensity/high duration quadrant or a teacher whose scattergram is evenly distributed across the four quadrants. Ultimately, the teacher’s goal is to see his/her students clustering in the high intensity, high duration quadrant. Our experience suggests that working with teachers on their scattergrams and retention strategies has a positive impact on student retention.
If Larry’s research can be replicated, it speaks to a couple of very important issues for our field. Open entry/open exit is one of them. The second is the length of the instructional segment, regardless of intensity. Our program has operated under the assumption that low intensity classes need to be longer in duration. For example, our night classes tend to run in 14 week segments whereas our daytime, high intensity classes tend to run about 7 weeks. This research certainly challenges this assumption.
Sandy Strunk
Program Director for Community Education
Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13
1020 New Holland Avenue
Lancaster, PA 17601
(717) 606-1873
Yes, when parents move so do their children. The public school system here has a very low graduation rate and a big factor is the number of students who haven’t dropped out but have moved out. And not surprising, their performance on meeting standards is not high no matter how hard the teachers in the system work to address the needs of the students.
Toni F. Borge
Adult Education & Transitions Program Director
Bunker Hill Community College
Chelsea Campus
175 Hawthorne Street
Chelsea, MA 02150
Phone: 617-228-2108
Fax:617-228-2106
E-mail: tborge@bhcc.mass.edu
