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| Grubb, W. N., Kalman, J., Castellano, M., Brown, C., & Bradby, D. (1991). Readin', writin' and 'rithmetic one more time: The role of remediation in vocational education and job training (MDS-309). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California. |
ALTERNATIVES TO SKILLS AND DRILLS
The alternatives to skills and drills are difficult to describe precisely. In
most cases, they are very much in active development; they have not yet been as
carefully codified, encapsulated in textbooks, or incorporated into teacher
training institutions. Those individuals who reject skills and drills do not
always embrace the same methods. The alternatives have developed separately in
different subjects--for example, in whole language approaches to reading,
writing, and speaking; in the "process" approach to writing; and in the recent
curriculum standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM,
1989)--so that their similarities are not always apparent. Finally, although
the alternatives to skills and drills have a large history in theories of
teaching and learning--extending back, for example, to John Dewey, and some of
his predecessors such as Pestalozzi and Froebel--they do not have an extensive
history of practice in the educational system of this country.[45] While our account of other approaches cannot possibly be
definitive, it is important to outline some characteristics of the alternatives
in order to suggest directions that remedial programs can take.
In this section, we first outline the polar alternative to skills and drills,
an approach we describe as "meaning-making." We then describe efforts we label
as "eclectic," which emerge when teachers combine elements of skills and drills
with practices based on meaning-making. Next, we examine "functional context
literacy training," an approach that has been offered as an alternative but
that proves to change only one of the assumptions underlying skills and drills.
We then describe several programs that link basic skills instruction and
vocational skills training in a manner close in spirit to functional context
training but in ways that are quite different from skills and drills--the
Center for Employment Training (CET) and the Ohio approach to "applied
academics." Finally, we describe an adult program based on the principles of
whole language--the most thorough example we have seen rejecting the
assumptions of skills and drills.
In many ways, the alternatives to skills and drills simply reverse each
underlying assumption. Perhaps the most important shift is to think of complex
capacities--reading, writing, the ability to use mathematics, scientific
competencies--not as the sum of discrete skills, but as capacities which are
not readily fragmented and which can be learned only by actually practicing
them. Thus, teachers within the whole language approach stress getting
students to read books and articles meaningful to them, worrying less about
whether they can understand every word or provide antonyms on a multiple-choice
test than whether they can extract meaning from a passage. Similarly, within
the writing process approach, teachers stress getting students to begin
writing, particularly writing that helps them express thoughts they consider
important. However, there is much less attention to the niceties of spelling,
punctuation, and grammar, which can be learned as the student progresses.
Similarly, the NCTM standards stress using mathematics to make sense of
phenomena around students, rather than mastering the computational techniques
that are better done by calculators or computers. In each of these examples,
then, the first task is to get students to read, to write, and to do
mathematics--not to develop small skills that will enable them sometime in the
future to do these things--and to do so with an eye to developing meaningful
interpretations of issues important to students.
A corollary of the effort to get students engaged in reading, writing, and
mathematics is that the exercises used must be meaningful in some important
way. This notion stands in sharp contrast to the practices in skills and
drills, in which reading, writing, and math exercises are dreamed up purely for
the sake of a curricular sequence and are likely to be intrinsically
meaningless because they are completely divorced from any of a student's
concerns. What makes something meaningful varies from student to student, of
course, so there is much greater emphasis within alternative approaches on
having students choose the materials and assignments they work with. For those
students seeking employment or advancement, work-related materials would be
appropriate (see the version of functional context training we describe below);
because work is of real interest to most adults, actual employment might form
the basis for learning, so some programs establish work experience programs or
draw on students' current employment. For students seeking admission to
college-level English or social science courses, readings drawn from literature
or the social sciences would be appropriate. However, in other cases,
work-related materials or great literature might be completely inappropriate to
a student's goals and interests. One implication is that the focus on the
needs of employers in many recent commission reports is out of place in
these alternative approaches, since, as in good practice in adult education
generally, student needs and interests should drive content.
Another fundament of meaning-making is that learning should be social,
not individual. Because reading, writing, and other forms of communication are
inherently social--their purpose, after all, is to communicate with others--and
meanings vary from one setting to another, it is impossible to convey to
students the nuances of communication, the variation in interpretation from one
person to another, and the social content of reading and writing without
working in groups. The alternatives to skills and drills, therefore, tend to
place great emphasis on interaction among students--rather than on individual
instruction, isolated work with computer-based instruction or workbooks, or
teacher lecturing--since social interaction is an important form of learning.
In turn, this means that students should learn from each other, not simply from
the teacher. The importance of group interaction means that classes must meet
at regular times, with an implicit social contract that all students will
attend regularly because the group and its cohesiveness are important to
learning--in place of the irregular attendance typical in most adult education.
The emphasis on group interaction does not eliminate individualization, but
instead gives it a very different meaning. Teachers are alert for signals of
student interest and for variations in learning styles, so that
"individualization" means that content and teaching methods are adapted to
individual students. In alternative approaches, students have many more real
choices and more ways to affect content than they do within skills and drills.
They can select reading and writing exercises, and they can direct the topics
of discussion, for example; student-centered classes often take directions
quite different from those that teachers plan, and teachers must be ready to
vary their plans as the interests of students emerge and change. To be sure,
individualization takes place within a group (just as it does in society at
large, one might add), and so it would be inappropriate for any one student's
interests to direct an entire class; even so, there are still many ways in
which both content and methods can be individualized.
The assumptions about students, teachers, and their interactions are also
quite different from those embedded in skills and drills. Most obviously,
teachers try to build upon the knowledge and capabilities of students and to
use these as resources in classrooms--in contrast to viewing remedial students
merely as deficient. This is not to deny that students enrolling in adult
education are relatively unsophisticated in their reading, writing, or ability
to do math. Rather, the assumption is that they have the capacities to do
these things well and that they have other abilities and experiences which will
facilitate their improvement. As a result, there is a much greater effort in
student-centered approaches to uncovering the interests and experiences of
students that will motivate them to read more, write with greater facility, or
understand the importance of various mathematical techniques. Furthermore,
because learning takes place in group settings with much more collaborative
learning than in the individualized instruction of skills and drills, students
are resources for each other and more advanced students work with their less
expert peers--another sense in which they are viewed as competent and,
therefore, capable of teaching others.
The role of teachers is also quite different. Rather than being managers of a
set curriculum, teachers facilitate learning by constantly evaluating the
strengths and difficulties of the group and of individual students and by
making continual decisions about materials to bring to the course, activities
to help students develop further, and ways to help students pursue their own
interests. Teachers spend much more time facilitating discussion than simply
lecturing. They are also more likely to model the techniques and procedures
for solving problems, writing a particular kind of document, or deriving
information from documents. Teachers must be much more active than in skills
and drills approaches. Not only must they gather materials and activities
which are tailored to the interests of students, but within the classroom they
must be keen observers of students' strengths and weaknesses; they must be
active listeners to take advantage of the learning opportunities that arise.
They also work in other ways to make exercises meaningful; for example, in many
writing courses, teachers try to get students to publish their writing as a way
of establishing it as a means of communication with others, not just as an
academic exercise for class.
In the alternatives to skills and drills, it is difficult to rely on a set
curriculum--a text, a computer program, or a set of workbooks "off the shelf."
Teachers within alternative traditions tend to develop their own curriculum
materials; the need to tailor materials to the interests and goals of students,
to their individual strengths and weaknesses, and to the direction of the group
means that an established curriculum cannot work well.
In contrast to the tendency for skills and drills to use simple and
unambiguous curriculum materials--basal readers, for example, with simplified
vocabulary and short sentences, and highly stylized math problems--the
materials used in alternative approaches are more likely to reflect those which
students commonly see, including newspapers, work-related reading such as
instruction manuals, real literature rather than basal readers, and
mathematical problems from work and daily life, with the difficulties and
ambiguities which normal activities have embedded in them. The simplified
materials of skills and drills are not only uninteresting and atypical of those
which people normally encounter, but they also fail to provide any subjects for
discussion: Without ambiguity and complexity, there is nothing for a group to
debate, no point to trying to devise different interpretations, nothing to
engage a class or an individual except the regurgitation of facts or the
derivation of the correct answer to an arithmetic exercise. Thus, it becomes
necessary for teachers to develop materials with an eye to the social nature of
learning--materials that will expand rather than close off discussion.
Finally, unlike conventional approaches which assume that the learner
is motivated, alternative approaches provide more intrinsic motivation. In
part, stimulation is provided by selecting activities that are themselves
meaningful and interesting to students. In addition, each student actively
participates in the conduct of the class and in setting its direction; students
are involved in assessment of their progress, normally in interaction with
teachers, rather than having progress monitored by an external standard (e.g.,
a test). Finally, rather than learning individually, peers should provide
support and motivation within a class, a place where students are supposed to
help one another. While there is obviously nothing that any pedagogical
approach can do about the external pressures which limit adult participation in
education--the demands of family and employment, in particular--these
alternative approaches can supply some elements of motivation, rather than
assuming that students are motivated enough to complete a skills and drills
program which is intrinsically meaningless.
What do we know about the effectiveness of alternative approaches compared to
those based on skills and drills? We know very little--though of course we
know very little about the effectiveness of any methods used in remedial
education. Even to raise the question of effectiveness generates new problems
because the goals of skills and drills methods--which aim to move students
along a well-defined hierarchy of skills and prepare them for a standardized
test such as the GED or TABE--are very different from alternative approaches in
the tradition of meaning-making.[47] The
purposes in the meaning-making approaches may vary with students and teachers
and may also be hard to measure. However, we note that some of the major
drawbacks now present in adult education programs--the motivational problems
that lead to high dropout rates, the fact that many adults find materials
boring and irrelevant to their concerns, the neglect of needs as students
articulate them, the irrelevance of teachers, and the absurdity of trying
skills and drills in short programs for students for whom it has previously
failed--are all remedied to some extent in alternative approaches. If we are
forced to judge the effectiveness of pedagogies on a priori grounds,
there is a good case that can be made for turning toward methods based on
meaning-making.
Both in responses to our questionnaires and in our visits to selected programs,
several administrators of remedial programs articulated an eclectic approach.
Most often, such programs begin with a standard curriculum--a series of texts
recognizable as skills and drills materials or a conventional computer-based
instruction program--and then elaborate it with supplementary reading, related
writing assignments, oral presentations, projects to send students out into the
community or to their employers and to report back to their classes, role
playing, and a variety of other activities quite different from those of skills
and drills. Part of the eclectic approach is to use a variety of
formats--classroom discussion, individual drill in workbooks, computer-based
instruction, one-on-one tutoring, and sometimes audio materials--in an effort
to present material to find out how individual students learn best, and to keep
up the interest of students. The teachers in such programs articulate a
process of constant search--for materials that students will like, for
alternative approaches that work for their students, and for ways of presenting
material that seem unfamiliar, abstract, or academic to their students--that is
quite pragmatic rather than motivated by any particular theories of teaching.
At the same time, these teachers are clearly driven by a concern with outcomes
and by a sense that their students are individuals with different interests,
needs, and external problems.
In our estimation, eclectic approaches are more common in community college
developmental programs than in adult schools or programs supported by JTPA and
welfare programs. Of the half dozen programs we interviewed that mentioned
eclectic approaches, all but one were in community colleges. The community
colleges we visited and others we interviewed by phone[48] had elements of eclectic approaches, including labs as
well as classrooms, individual instruction as well as discussion methods,
writing as well as reading and math, and several levels of courses. Within the
literature on developmental education, the dominant conventions of good
practice uniformly suggest the need to use varied approaches, including those
that engage students more actively; and one view within community colleges
specifically attacks skill-based approaches and narrow conceptions of
functional literacy and argues instead for whole language methods, the
integration of remedial education with vocational and academic content areas,
and other practices drawn from meaning-making (e.g., see Bojar, 1982;
Luvaas-Briggs, 1983; and McGlinn, 1988). This is not to say that all community
colleges have moved away from skills and drills, since some of them have
minimal remedial programs and some are probably indistinguishable from ABE.
However, community colleges seem to have more resources than adult schools do
and to have a more open and experimental attitude toward teaching; the
instructors in community colleges are more likely to be full time and to be
dedicated to teaching adults, rather than part-time instructors who have no
special preparation in adult education.
When teachers and administrators describe an eclectic approach, it is
impossible to ascertain the balance of skills and drills and meaning-making.
Even when visiting programs, it is difficult to determine the balance from a
day's visit; to see what students experience over the course of an entire
program, extended observation would be necessary--something that has rarely
been done in remediation programs (for an exception, see Hull, 1991). From
observations during our visits to programs, however, it is clear that the
balance of elements is crucial to the student's perception of purpose; an
exercise drawn from whole language or writing process approaches embedded in a
program that is otherwise based on skills and drills is not necessarily
effective. One clear example came in a program for youth sponsored by JTPA,
which included twenty minutes of sustained silent reading and a period of
journal writing--two favorite exercises of those espousing whole language
approaches (e.g., see Soifer, Crumrine, Honzaki, Irwin, Simmons, & Young,
1990)--in a curriculum otherwise indistinguishable from a conventional high
school curriculum. The students were paying little attention to either their
reading or their writing, and they seemed to treat these periods as lulls in an
otherwise jam-packed schedule. In another example, the instructor (or lab
manager) of an extreme skills and drills computer-based JTPA program for adults
gave the students a writing assignment based on "clustering," an activity in
which students throw out clusters of ideas in order to find a focus and an
organizational form for a writing task--an exercise drawn from writing process
methods. The students greeted the assignment with obvious dislike, and the
instructor had to add that the only excuse she would accept for missing class
would be a note from the coroner's office. Our interpretation is that, in a
program where students have no choice about what they do and where reading and
writing are treated as skills which other adults say must be learned, students
will view free reading and writing as coerced assignments, not as exercises
that will help them explore issues of concern. (In addition, there is the
obvious question of how important a writing exercise can be if it takes two
hours per month out of about eighty hours.) Skills and drills is an internally
consistent approach to teaching, and meaning-making can also be viewed as an
internally consistent system with the assumptions of skills and drills
reversed; as a result, mixing elements from different approaches may lead to
inconsistent assumptions and practices that undermine rather than reinforce one
another.
In our view, considerably more observation, analysis, and evaluation are
required to determine what eclectic approaches work. However, we interpret the
development of eclectic programs as a hopeful sign--as a signal that teachers
are dissatisfied with conventional teaching methods and are actively
experimenting with alternatives more appropriate to the needs of their adult
students.
One approach that has been promoted as an alternative to conventional
remediation programs is functional context literacy training. Most closely
associated with the work of Thomas Sticht (Sticht, et al., 1987; Sticht &
Mikulecky, 1984; Sticht, 1990), functional context training seeks to "integrate
literacy training into technical training" on the grounds that learning basic
skills is easier in the context of vocational training where such skills have
obvious application (Sticht, et al., 1987, p. 107). The proponents of
functional context literacy training argue that there are motivational
advantages as well because trainees can see the purpose of learning basic
skills related to their future occupations; therefore, dropout rates should be
lower than in conventional remedial programs. In terms of the assumptions of
the standard approach, functional context training replaces the
decontextualized materials of skills and drills with materials drawn from a
specific context--in this case, a particular occupation.
While functional context training has an obvious appeal and has made many
converts (and some enemies),[49] the evidence
in its favor is limited. The programs evaluated so far have been in the
military, and their applicability to civilian training is unclear. The
evidence seems to show greater increases in job-related reading among those
individuals in certain functional context programs compared with those in
general literacy programs, while the gains in general reading scores are
comparable. However, there are several possible explanations for this
pattern,[50] so the superiority of functional
context approaches over others is unclear. The appeal of the functional
context approach must, therefore, rest on the logic of the programs themselves,
rather than evaluation results.
While it is sometimes difficult to ascertain what functional context programs
do, several principles underlie the approach. One is "to try to make the
instruction as meaningful as possible to the learner in terms of his or her
prior knowledge," relating new information to old knowledge. A second is "to
use, as much as possible, `real life' situations, tasks, and materials that the
learner will encounter after training or education as part of the educational
program, and to make this relationship clear to students," to clarify the
relationship between instruction to a future goal and to promote the transfer
of learning from the classroom to the next setting in which it will be used
(Sticht et al., 1987, p. 122). Another principle underlying functional context
literacy training is that "skills and knowledge are best learned if they are
presented in a context that is meaningful to persons" (Sticht & Mikulecky,
1984, p. 33)--a view that explicitly rejects the decontextualized approach of
skills and drills.
Functional context training also draws on the observation that the knowledge
and skills needed for the workplace are different from those required in
school-like exercises (Mikulecky, 1983; Resnick 1987; Sticht, 1987; Venezky,
Wagner, & Ciliberti, 1990). By almost any standard, the capacities
required in work are different from and more complex than those taught in basic
skills and drills programs; the contention, in reports such as Workplace
Basics: The Skills Employers Want and The Bottom Line: Basic Skills in
the Workplace, that successful workers must have problem-solving abilities,
take responsibility, interact effectively with others, and communicate clearly
implies that the simple cognitive skills taught in most schools and in most
adult education programs are insufficient. By embedding learning in work-like
tasks--or even in actual employment when learning is conducted within work
experience programs--functional context training promises to eliminate the
disjuncture between the skills required on the job and those taught in
convention approaches.
In sum, functional context approaches replace the practice common to skills
and drills of using decontextualized materials with a particular context--most
often job-related--from which reading materials, writing exercises, and various
non-cognitive skills (e.g., interpersonal skills) are drawn. However, these
approaches do not consciously change the other assumptions underlying teaching
methods, so specific functional context programs vary considerably. Some of
them represent substantial departures from skills and drills. For example, in
the second strand of the Functional Literacy (FLIT) program, developed for the
Army, trainees read a simplified three hundred to four hundred word passage
drawn from a specific occupation; then they translated the reading into another
form--pictures, classification tables, or flowcharts--and discussed their
representations, an activity close to whole language approaches with their
efforts to use writing and oral presentations as well as reading. The
electronics technician program described by Hickey, Howard, and Sticht (1987)
suggests (as optional activities, to be sure) that instructors encourage
students to explore electrical devices on their own, to share these with
classmates, and to read about electronics outside of class. The curriculum
itself asks students to reconstruct rather than to simply regurgitate
instruction, though other exercises are similar to skills and drills.
Similarly, Sticht and Mikulecky (1984) describe a functional context program
designed to train word processors:
Assignments were planned to integrate language and machine skills.
Much of the classroom simulated actual job demands. Students would compose
business communication that other students would edit and later produce in
final form on word processing equipment. A good deal of the work involved
using actual business communication that was handwritten in rough draft form
with editing notations. The job simulation training that integrated language
and machine experience ranged from about 5 percent of assignments the first
week to nearly 100 percent in the final weeks. Class assignments attempted to
replicate the time constraints present in business performance. Though much of
the work was done on an individual level, some work made use of worker teams,
which again replicated workplace conditions. (p. 13)
Based on this description, the program incorporated a number of elements not
normally associated with skills and drills: the use of materials that were
inherently meaningful in the sense that they were drawn from actual work
settings; interaction among students in editing and the use of work groups; and
job simulation, which introduces modeling as a form of learning as well as the
behavioral and interpersonal dimensions of work. Although there may have been
some elements of skills and drills within the program, the basic approach
appears to be a more eclectic one, incorporating many elements of
meaning-making, in which the simulation of actual job demands drives the
program rather than a sequence of small skills. Finally, the programs we
describe in the next section--the Center for Employment Training, the applied
academics initiative in the Ohio schools, and the Eastern Michigan University
Workplace Education Academy--also use curriculum materials drawn from
vocational skills training, occupational materials, or actual work that
students perform; and they use these materials in ways quite different from
skills and drills.
However, other examples of functional context training preserve many elements
of skills and drills. In one case, Sticht identified two reading tasks:
reading to do, which is composed of 186 subtasks; and reading to learn, which
is composed of 143 subtasks (Sticht, 1979). In another example, again drawn
from the military, Philippi (1989) recommended a process of task analysis:
identifying key tasks and concepts, writing learning objectives, categorizing
job tasks according to the level of reading required, and selecting materials
to teach each job-related reading task.
Both approaches suggest the fragmentation of capacities into small subskills,
as skills and drills methods tend to do. The literacy program designed to
teach reading to do and to learn "provides extensive drill and practice in
locating and extracting information from job-reading materials. Each module
includes a pre- and a posttest. Each module consists of material and numerous
worksheets requiring that the person performs the tasks indicated by the module
name" (Sticht 1979, p. 129). In one strand of the Army's FLIT program,
described as a "modular, self-paced, mastery-based program of job reading task
training" (Sticht et al., 1987, p. 114), individuals were given materials drawn
from one of six specific occupations. They were also given drill and practice
in using a table of contents, an index, tables and graphs, and a manual to look
up facts; in following instructions; and in filling out forms. In the "reading
for learning" strand, "materials were written at a lower difficulty level than
those encountered in job training and were developed to give students a
knowledge base for processing written texts common to their jobs. These
passages were written without redundancy and elaboration" (Sticht, 1979, p.
122). In other words, the texts used were not materials that would be used on
the job, but simplified versions written specifically for the program; the
elimination of redundancy and elaboration, the criteria for developing basal
readers used in most elementary schools, means that they lack the ambiguity and
complexity that an individual will find on the job. The purpose, to be sure,
is to help students learn to read. Justifying the simplification of texts ties
in with this purpose; however, whether these simplified materials prepare
individuals for the complexity of working under normal working conditions is
unclear--just as the ability to synthesize fragmented subskills presented in
the skills and drills methods is unclear.
These examples clarify that in some cases functional context literacy training
follows many of the practices of skills and drills. The tendency to base
programs on minutely detailed lists of job requirements is identical to the
approach within skills and drills of breaking competencies into collections of
specific skills. The exercises in these programs--drilling and practicing with
worksheets and with pre- and posttests, looking up facts, and filling in
charts--are common in skills and drills. Functional context programs vary
somewhat, however, in that the reading materials are drawn from specific
occupations. The development of simplified reading materials is similar to the
practice in skills and drills of using simplified, shortened material written
specifically for the remedial program. The assumption of student deficiency,
so common to skills and drills, is also true in at least some functional
context programs: Sticht (1990) describes the usefulness of the approach for
"lower aptitude, less literate" young people, and the very first sentence of a
functional context program for electronics technicians states, "The goal of
this course is to teach introductory electronics technician's knowledge and
skill to students whose basic academic skills (reading and mathematics) and
electronics 'aptitude' are lower than ordinarily thought necessary to study
electronics" (Hickey et al., p. 1). Rarely do the proponents of functional
context training elaborate the role of teachers, their special characteristics,
or their interactions with students; while teachers may be crucial to the
success of functional context methods--because, for example, they must be
familiar with the context that motivates the programs--in other respects one
can only conclude that teachers need not change the way they engage students or
approach curriculum materials.
Within some functional context programs, the conception of "context" seems to
be that curriculum materials and exercises are drawn from particular
occupations. However, this is a very different and narrower conception of
context than other writers attacking decontextualized learning have used, for
whom a context includes the social norms and expectations, the personal
relationships, the purposes in reading and writing, and other aspects of the
social setting in which reading and writing occur--not merely the origins of
texts and learning exercises (e.g., see Scribner & Cole, 1981; Heath, 1983;
Erickson, 1988; Street, 1984). To be sure, other functional context programs
do embrace this broader conception of context and incorporate cooperative
learning, role play, job simulation, and other exercises designed to explore
the social setting of work. Once again, functional context methods can be used
in very different ways; even the basic conception of context can be
interpreted in ways that either ignore the social construction of job
requirements (as skills and drills does) or incorporate this assumption
critical to meaning-making.
In sum, the functional context approach does overturn one of the fundamental
practices of skills and drills--divorcing instruction from any possible context
in which competencies might be used. However, in other respects, functional
context training is compatible either with skills and drills or with
meaning-making, or with eclectic approaches drawing from both pedagogical
approaches. It is a mistake, we think, to interpret functional context
literacy training as a complete replacement for conventional remedial education
since it replaces only some of the basic assumptions underlying skills and
drills, and can too easily lead to programs that look like conventional
remediation in almost all their details.
One final limitation of functional context training is worth noting. As a way
of providing both context and motivation for individuals enrolled in vocational
education and job training or in other employment-related programs, the notion
of using job-related tasks and materials is wholly appropriate. However, for a
broader range of literacy and remedial programs not connected to
employment, functional context approaches may not be appropriate because these
approaches assume that employment success and advancement is crucial to those
enrolled--rather than asking them about their reasons for enrollment. That is,
the context is specified by people other than the learner, leading to the
possibility that learners will see the context as imposed and the program as
uninteresting (Jurmo, 1991). In a variety of adult education, developmental
programs, and even workplace literacy programs sponsored by employers (like the
Workplace Education Academy profiled below) other motives may
dominate--parental, avocational, or political. Indeed, some adult students
seek a respite from work, so work-oriented instruction may be the last thing
they want.[51] Again, it is inappropriate to
view functional context approaches as a replacement for all forms of remedial
and adult education.
While functional context literacy training has received widespread attention,
there are very few programs that attempt to integrate basic skills or academic
instruction with job-related training. In our survey of providers in
twenty-three regions, only two providers out of roughly seventy-five that we
interviewed responded that they made any conscious link between their remedial
component and job skills training. In a few instances, providers claimed to
connect the two, but it became clear that they were referring to concurrent
enrollment--a practice in which individuals are enrolled in remediation and in
vocational education at the same time but with each component remaining
independent from the other. "Concurrency" may have some motivational
advantages over sequential programs if students are motivated to continue in
remediation because of the interest they have in the vocational component.
(Some community colleges have reported moving to concurrent enrollment to
reduce dropout rates in developmental education, and California is
experimenting with "concurrency" in both its welfare-to-work effort and in
8-Percent programs.) However, concurrent enrollment does not necessarily use
work-related materials or settings as the basis of remediation, as functional
context training would require, nor does it integrate vocational training and
academic instruction in any other way.
However, a few programs provide remediation, or basic skills instruction, in
the context of vocational training and in ways quite different from
skills and drills. These examples are instructive because they indicate how it
might be possible to use work as the basis for other kinds of education. But
they also suffer from some notable limitations, stemming again from their
connection to employment. Linking remediation to job training proves to be a
two-edged sword, then, and it is important to identify both the power and the
limitations of this approach.
The Center for Employment Training (CET), with headquarters in San Jose, is a
CBO providing job training in about thirty other cities in the West, most of
them in California. Like most CBOs, CET survives by combining a number of
funding sources, though JTPA provides about eighty percent of its revenues for
vocational training (CET, 1989). Part of CET's philosophy is to incorporate
comprehensive services, including vocational skills training, remediation,
language instruction for non-English-speaking individuals, and job placement
services. All basic skills instruction is provided within the context of
vocational training rather than being a separate component. CET was
dissatisfied with the conventional arrangement (classes called "feeder 1, 2,
and 3") requiring remediation before skills training, a sequence that caused
high dropout rates. The integration of basic skills with vocational skills
training has recently been identified as the reason for its success, compared
to other programs serving minority female single parents, in a well-designed
evaluation of four such programs (Burghardt & Gordon, 1990). While this
evaluation cannot formally support this conclusion,[52] it is apparent that this is a more effective program than
many others operated by JTPA.
Our visit to CET's San Jose program clarified the way in which integration
takes place. Individuals applying to CET first tour the different programs
available in electronics assembly, custodial occupations, food service,
maintenance, printing and graphics, shipping and receiving, office skills,
child care, food service, machining, precision sheet metal, and automotives.
They then elect a program and take an assessment test; the results are used for
diagnosis only, not as a barrier to entering particular programs. Each program
operates on an open-entry/open-exit basis, with new students entering every
Monday; since it is competency-based, students may exit whenever they have
mastered a set of competencies. While the time to completion varies, time in
the program averages around six months.[53]
Within each program area, there are typically two instructors and twenty-five
to thirty students. The instructors, most of whom come from industry, teach
both vocational skills and remediation, so that basic skills instruction can
easily refer to the job skills being learned in the program. Typically,
workshops are next to classroom areas, so it is physically easy to move between
the two as well; for example, a few teachers mentioned that students having
trouble with a concept in the classroom would be sent to the workshop to work
with materials (e.g., in machining), and then move back to the classroom.
There are a few "pull-out" classes, one in ESL and one a GED preparation class,
that are taught independently of vocational skills training; these follow
conventional skills and drills formats. Otherwise, however, everything is
taught by the two instructors within the single workshop/classroom space.
Apart from the fluidity of movement between basic skills and vocational
skills, the CET program is remarkable for the variety of different kinds of
instruction that goes on. Teachers introduce new job skills and some basic
skills by modeling rather than lecturing, using the "show and tell" methods
common in vocational education.[54] Students
then spend time in the equivalent of a workshop--practicing assembly in the
electronics program or operating printing machines, for example. The teachers
we observed team-taught rather than specializing in any way, increasing
opportunities for one-on-one instruction for students who had problems. Most
programs also perform real work: The print shop prints all the material
required by CET and contracts for small print jobs; the food service program
operates the cafeteria; the child care program operates a center for the
students' children as well as for children from the community; and the
custodial program does all the cleaning required for CET. This provides yet
another form of learning both job skills and job-appropriate behavior. Basic
skills instruction involves some lecture and conventional worksheet exercises,
but also a good deal of one-on-one instruction as students come up to
instructors when they are having problems; the interaction between students and
teachers is typical of that which is found in vocational classes--where
teachers circulate and provide highly individualized guidance to students
asking for help--than conventional lecturing. Language instruction is clearly
an important component: All of the instructors are bilingual in English and
Spanish, and the majority of students are Spanish-speaking. English is
stressed within CET, and the importance of English to employment is constant;
in one classroom, for example, a large sign proclaims: "In this class we speak
English. English means jobs!" In practice, however, students and instructors
move between Spanish and English as necessary for both job-related and general
uses of language, making the program bilingual. Finally, there is a heavy
emphasis on job-related behavior: Students punch in and out as they would on
the job; the classroom rules (like those pertaining to coffee breaks) mimic
those in employment; and the real work performed within each program provides
additional opportunities for instructors both to model appropriate behavior and
to require such behavior of their students.
Within this variety of instructional methods, there are--not
surprisingly--many exercises that follow the patterns of skills and drills. In
one class, students were copying sentences from the blackboard; a second class
was reviewing long lists of homonyms; and worksheets of arithmetic problems
were similar to those in conventional remedial classes. However, these
elements of skills and drills do not dominate the program by any means, and the
program as a whole shares few of the assumptions--about the nature of learning,
teachers, students, or curriculum--underlying skills and drills. Furthermore,
because of the close connection between job skills training and basic skills
instruction, it is plausible that students interpret these drills differently
than they would in a conventional remedial program. They understand the
importance of basic skills to future occupations, and they are being led in
skills and drills by the same instructors who teach them in quite different
ways in other parts of the program.[55]
With the many advantages of CET, there remains an obvious limitation. The
funding constraints of JTPA and the other programs that support CET limit the
program to providing relatively short periods of training. As a result,
CET--like other JTPA programs--prepares individuals for entry-level jobs in
relatively low-skilled positions such as child care workers, secretaries,
electronics assemblers, janitors, and food service workers. Quite
consistently, instructors reported that students go into entry-level positions
at $6.00 to $8.00 an hour, above the minimum wage for unskilled work but
probably not enough to earn one's way out of poverty.[56] For the academic skills taught in the program, the focus
on moderately skilled occupations means that there is little need for very
advanced competencies: The math required in these occupations is rarely more
complex than arithmetic with fractions and decimals; the reading rarely rises
above short passages read for content; and the writing is largely concerned
with filling out forms. The focus on entry-level jobs, then, while necessary
given the limitations of JTPA funding, constrains the academic competencies
taught in the program to very basic skills. Although instructors at CET hope
that individuals will be able to move up job ladders after they gain
entry-level positions, they are not being prepared for more advanced positions.
If job mobility requires more advanced occupation-specific skills or academic
capacities, they will have to be learned on the job, or an individual will have
to return to school to master them.
Although Ohio's Applied Academics program is aimed at secondary vocational
education students rather than adults, it illustrates many of the
possibilities--and the limitations--of integrating remediation with vocational
skill training.[57] In many of the area
vocational schools and in a few of the comprehensive high schools, academic
teachers teach applied academic courses in place of conventional math, English,
and science.[58] For example, a math teacher
will teach a section of applied math for students in an electronics program,
concentrating on the specific kinds of math--extending in this case to algebra
and some trigonometry--required in electronics and for the specific
applications they need in their vocational labs; different sections of applied
math are developed for each of the other vocational subjects. Similarly,
applied communication classes concentrate on the reading, writing, and oral
capacities--including abilities to read specialized diagrams and
documents--required in specific vocational areas. In addition, some applied
science classes focus on the science required in such areas as health and
animal care. Teachers develop all curriculum materials, since they must tailor
the content to the particular requirements and sequence of each vocational
subject.
All academic teachers in the program spend at least one period each week in
the appropriate vocational class so that they are familiar with the content,
vocabulary, and methods of the specific subject. The result is that teachers
in the applied academic classes can reinforce lessons from the vocational
classes at the same time they are providing instruction in academic
competencies. In some schools, vocational and academic instructors teach
together, providing the kind of seamless instruction that we observed at CET.
We also observed a great deal of innovative teaching of academic material,
replacing the conventional skills and drills format with approaches closer to
the activity-based methods of good vocational education.
However, the Applied Academics program in Ohio suffers from the same
limitation as the Center for Employment Training (CET). The content of each
applied academics class is related closely to the requirements of a specific
vocational program in order to assure student motivation and to provide a
context for academic material--precisely the logic of functional context
training. But because these programs are defined as preparation for
entry-level jobs in relatively low-skilled work--as animal care workers, child
care workers, auto body mechanics, carpenters and cabinet-makers, for
example--the academic content is correspondingly elementary. While
electronics, machining, and drafting require algebra, geometry, and some
trigonometry, the majority of these occupations require little more than
arithmetic; while secretaries must master complex rules of grammar,
punctuation, and sentence construction, most entry-level occupations require
little writing aside from filling in forms. Moreover, a good deal of applied
communication involves oral communications rather than the high-level reading
we conventionally associate with high school English courses. As a result,
many of the applied academics courses in Ohio are essentially basic education
or remedial courses, even though they are well-taught and well-integrated with
vocational skills training in the manner of functional context training. What
the program in Ohio has not done--what very few high schools or job training
programs have done--is to provide vocational preparation for a range of jobs or
for job clusters, and then to use the range of capacities required in such
clusters to motivate academic instruction that is more than simply remedial.
One adult education program based explicitly on the principles of "whole
language" is the Eastern Michigan University Workplace Education Academy,
located in several auto plants in Michigan.[59] The program, funded by the union and the firms, conducts
"courses" lasting eight weeks and meeting for two 90 minute sessions per week.
These are not courses in the sense of standardized subjects taught in
conventional high schools and colleges, however; they include topics such as
Reading and Writing Improvement, Famous Black Americans, Map Reading, Technical
Reading and Writing, Women's Issues, Places in the News, Organic Gardening,
Business Japanese, Reading to Understand, Problem-Solving Strategies, and Smart
Money. The staff develops course topics on the basis of interest expressed by
workers, on developments from previous successful courses, and on topics
related to employment needs such as plant safety and the math necessary for
statistical process control. In developing courses, the teachers try to stay
alert to the needs of workers. One teacher noticed that students had
difficulty reading anything on a map (e.g., for using the grid system to
locate cities and reading mileage scales); she then developed a map-reading
course. The courses are advertised to workers on the basis of communicative
competencies, not achievement of specific grade-level equivalents or passage of
the GED. The flyer for Reading and Writing Improvement asks: "Would you like
to gain a better understanding of materials you read? Express your ideas on a
variety of topics? Organize your thoughts more easily on paper?" The flyer
for "Ford: The Man and the Machine" similarly stresses communicative
competencies, not simply information: "Would you like to read articles about
Ford: the man, the machine, and the company? Learn strategies to improve your
reading comprehension? Gain the ability to organize your thoughts more easily
on paper?"
One fundament of the program is the whole-language practice of including
reading, writing, listening, and speaking in all courses. Therefore, courses
are never simple recitations of facts or drills on specific skills, but engage
students in a variety of activities so that they are actively reading, writing,
and participating in discussions. There is a basic reading-discussion-writing
format to each class. Students read silently for twenty minutes at the
beginning of each class, and then keep records of their reading. Discussion
takes place around the readings and the writings that students do; the
classrooms are set up with tables seating six to eight students to promote
discussion, cooperation, and small group work. There are no individual carrels
which might separate students--reflecting an assumption that learning should be
collaborative and interactive and that the diversity of students' responses to
the course content constitutes a resource.
Writings are developed around the students' interests, often emerging from
discussions and reading. A crucial element is that teachers help students get
their writing published, so writing is read by others and has some
communicative purpose, rather than being an academic exercise. Student
writings have been published in local newspapers, union newsletters and company
bulletins, and their ideas have been put into letters to vendors and organized
into presentations to employee groups and management meetings. Collections of
student work are kept in the academy for others to read.
Another basic assumption is that language must be meaningful to students. The
program does not rely, therefore, on basal readers or the kinds of
special-purpose textbooks and computer programs often used in adult education
programs, with their short, artificial, and trivial reading passages. Instead,
the materials are those which students face in their normal lives, both on and
off the job. Materials vary in their complexity, to be sure, but they include
the variety and ambiguity of "real" reading and provide the basis for extended
discussion, elaboration, and further writing. Students also choose many of the
materials they read from books and magazines collected by teachers and
available for both class and home use. The conception of individualization in
this program is, therefore, very different from that embedded in skills and
drills; individualization within the academy refers to students having a voice
in what they learn and when they learn it at every stage, from electing
particular courses, to deciding what to read and write, to monitoring their own
progress, to assessing their progress near the end of the course.
Unlike many adult education programs, students do not take an initial test to
assess their abilities, and no individual is denied access to a course because
of low achievement. To be sure, individuals with minimal reading skills may
read relatively simple texts or listen to audio tapes while reading, but every
course includes individuals of all achievement levels. An apparently banal
statement--"everyone must be viewed as a reader" (Soifer et al., 1990, p.
25)--is enormously revealing about the program's philosophy that adult
education should concentrate on the assets and not the deficits of individuals,
and use these assets to stimulate further development. In the case of writing,
for example:
Language experience simply means recalling experiences, forming
ideas, and developing thoughts on a topic, and then expressing them, first
orally and next in writing. This process is aided by the use of
thought-provoking topics, articles, and stories, which trigger discussion and
thinking, which, in turn, lead to writing. Adults who perceive themselves as
nonreaders and nonwriters (or who are perceived as such by the teacher) can
succeed with writing activities based on their experience. Because the focus
is on assets rather than deficits, the learner realizes he or she is a capable
person, not a failure. By building on the connections between writing and
reading, that is, by using learners' writings as the basis for learning to
read, individualization is achieved more readily than by trying to match
learners with a packaged program in the hope that the materials will meet their
needs and, what's more, satisfy their interests and capabilities. (Soifer et
al., 1990, p. 18)
Along the same lines, assessment at the end of
a course is based on portfolio methods: Teachers review folders of students'
work to help them evaluate their own learning and help them decide what to do
next--a highly individualized procedure (unlike conventional standardized
tests) that allows students to express what they have learned, rather than
risking the discovery that they have failed once more to pass an externally
imposed test (Goodman, Goodman, & Hood, 1989).
The academy programs do include GED courses for those students who want to
pass the GED for their own reasons. However, the GED is not of vital
importance--unlike the case in many adult education, JTPA, and welfare
programs, where it has become the Holy Grail driving all other efforts.
Furthermore, preparation for the GED is taught in much the same way other
academy courses are taught, applying whole language principles (Soifer et al.,
1990, chap. 3). While the course uses a GED preparation book as the text,
teachers engage in extensive discussion, augment workbooks with additional
materials, and set aside time for independent reading. Writing is also
incorporated into all phases of the GED course, since a writing sample is part
of the GED. Teachers specifically address test-taking strategies to get over
the anxieties students have about standardized tests. They also have students
examine the holistic scoring used in the writing sample and take on the role of
scorers for class writings, both to give them more opportunities for writing
and to let them "in on the secret" of how the test works. The GED course
provides an illustration that even programs driven by standardized tests can be
elaborated with related discussions, writing exercises, and meta-cognitive
teaching, rather than teaching only those skills that will be tested.
The academy programs have made several efforts to generate courses based on
the employment needs of their students. Given the assumption of good practice
in adult education that courses and materials should meet the needs of
students, the incorporation of job-related material in such programs should be
a natural development.[60] However, the two
firms involved have been reluctant to cooperate in developing such job-related
content, even though they provide financial support for the academies. For
example, the academy taught an industrial math course to prepare individuals
for the statistical process control (SPC) course taught in one of the firms,
and also developed a safety course to augment a company course on safety.
However, the firm provided very limited support to alert workers about the
pre-SPC math. The academy personnel were not informed about a mandatory class
on safety training nor about an increased emphasis on employee health
practices, and so were unable to cooperate with the firm in developing their
own safety course. More generally, there has been no provision for released
time for academy courses. The most obvious forms of cooperation--in which
company officials would ask academy personnel to establish courses in areas
where they see deficiencies or in cases where there will be changes--have
apparently never taken place. The lack of cooperation seems strange given the
volume of complaints from the business community about the need to elevate the
skills of the labor force; it suggests an opportunity lost for both the
employers and the employees. It illustrates the difficulty even
well-intentioned programs may have in incorporating work-related materials into
their curricula.
Finally, the teachers in the academy programs are quite different from those
in most other adult education programs. They are full-time teachers, rather
than holding other jobs and teaching on a part-time basis. They are committed
to adult education, and do not consider their positions to be unimportant or
low status. Unlike teachers in some other programs we visited, who seemed to
think of adult education as a necessary evil given the failures of high schools
and the deficiencies of students, academy instructors interpret adult education
as positive because of its power to expand the capacities of students. They
also think highly of their students, with little groaning about skill
deficiencies typical in many adult education programs. Staff selection and
development are a crucial aspect of the Academy Model (Soifer et al., 1990,
chap. 6), rather than an aspect which is ignored or dismissed with easy
language about the need for teachers to be sensitive and caring. Teachers are
absolutely central to the academies: They devise the curriculum rather than
using materials that come from elsewhere. Also, the interactions, with
students and among students, that are the heart of the whole language approach,
place enormous responsibilities on teachers.
In every way, then, the academy program differs from the assumptions of skills
and drills--in assumptions about learning, students, teachers, interactions
among students and between students and teachers, the nature of the curriculum
materials, and about individualization. To be sure, the program cannot always
achieve the goals it sets for itself. The model of group work--which stems
from the assumption that literacy education is a social activity requiring
interaction rather than an individual activity--is not completely implemented,
and the academy programs work with both groups and individual students.[61] The cooperation with the auto industry is
imperfect, restricting the ability of the academy to incorporate work-related
courses and activities. Recruitment remains a major problem partly because
workers have busy schedules, they do not get release time for academy courses,
and they have to be sold on the value of the academy. Despite these problems,
the academy is the closest example we have seen of an approach to adult
education completely different from skills and drills--one which clarifies that
such programs can be developed, that they are coherent, and that they can be
effective for their students.
In surveying alternatives to skills and drills, one striking finding is how
much they vary in their ambitions--and, therefore, in the sophistication of
what they provide their students. At one end, the narrowest forms of
functional context literacy training prepare individuals to read narrowly
defined job-related material in the most efficient way possible, as well as to
do the simple math associated with relatively unskilled jobs. Similarly,
although the Applied Academic programs in the Ohio schools and the integrated
approach of CET use very different approaches from skills and drills, they
still focus only on those capacities necessary for entry-level jobs, which are
usually quite basic indeed. At the other end, developmental education programs
in community colleges aim to prepare students for college-level work in both
vocational and academic subjects, in theory providing a complete continuum of
instruction without a ceiling; and the programs of the Eastern Michigan
University Workplace Education Academy are similarly open-ended, though in
practice they are limited by funding and by the numbers of students they can
recruit. On another dimension of ambition, some skills and drills programs
that developed from the functional context perspective emphasize only cognitive
skills, while others--including CET, many of the Ohio applied academics
courses, and some community college programs--emphasize work-related behavior
as well. Programs driven by whole-language and the search for meaning have
different conceptions of competencies altogether. Although they certainly
strive to enable students to read, write, and speak with facility and to use
mathematics for both routine applications and for problem-solving, they also
seek to develop self-reflection and independence in students, to allow them to
take more responsibility for learning so that they can define for themselves
what they need, and to pursue learning independently. This capacity may be
valuable in employment, but it is also applicable to every sphere of life; it
is, in effect, problem-solving ability very different from that embedded in
conventional skills and drills.
A second obvious observation about the alternatives described in this section
is that they vary enormously in their pedagogy. The functional context
programs that in other respects conform to skills and drills assumptions are
quite different from those which have tried to integrate basic skills
instruction with job skills training; the relative balance of skills and drills
and alternative approaches in eclectic programs varies enormously, in ways that
are quite difficult to describe. Furthermore, when we examine programs with
different mixes of teaching methods, it is often difficult to understand what
programs are trying to accomplish, never mind to evaluate their effectiveness.
The consistency of different components drawn from different philosophies and
styles of teaching, the motivation that different elements provide or fail to
provide to students, the ways in which students experience these eclectic
programs, the possibilities that certain elements will be rendered meaningless
by others--these are questions which are extremely difficult to answer. While
the assumptions and the internal consistency of a well-developed pedagogy such
as skills and drills are clear and we are beginning to understand the basis of
meaning-making, eclectic mixtures are more baffling to us.
These twin themes--the variation in ambitions among different programs and
uncertainty about effectiveness--will return in the final section when we
examine possible directions for future policy. For the moment, it is
sufficient to note that there are substantial alternatives to skills and
drills, following several different lines of development. Many of them have
substantial promise in remedying some persistent problems in remediation--the
motivational problem, the fact that many adults report skills and drills
programs to be boring and meaningless, the irrelevance of many programs to
subsequent education or job training, and the fact that most remedial programs
violate the conventional assumptions of good practice in adult education.
Above all, the simple fact that many adults have not learned through skills and
drills in schools suggests that trying skills and drills one more time is
senseless and that a new approach is appropriate. But even at a more basic
level, the existence of different pedagogies suggests that a more experimental
approach is both possible and necessary--one in which, as a matter of federal
and state policy, remedial programs begin to vary their approaches and evaluate
the effects carefully.
[45] The one exception may be the
incorporation of developmental ideas about learning in the early childhood
programs since the nursery schools of the 1920s.
[46] This section is based on our observations of various programs, as
well as on our interpretations of Soifer Crumrine, Honzaki, Irwin, Simmons, and
Young (1990); Collins, Balmuth, and Jean (1989); Stein (1990); Fingeret (1990);
Lemke (1989); Resnick (1987); Rogoff (1990); Arnove (1989); Fingeret and Jurmo
(1989); and Brookfield (1984). In addition, the citations in footnote 40,
which are works describing some dimensions of skills and drills, usually
contain some elements of the alternatives to skills and drills. The approach
we describe as meaning-making is referred to by others as learner-centered
instruction (Knowles, 1980), or active learning, or the "holistic" approach
(Tomlinson 1989)--all of which are partial descriptors; see also the Freirean
model for job training described by Shor (1990) and the notion of "cognitive
apprenticeship" in Collins, Brown, and Newman (1986). We call this alternative
approach meaning-making because of some parallels to developments in
psychology, linguistics, literary analysis, and other disciplines that stress
interpretation and meaning-making; see especially Bruner (1990).
[47] See, for example, the interchange about
evaluating whole language programs in McKenna, Miller, and Robinson (1990) and
Edelsky (1990).
[48] Based on evidence provided by LARC
(1988a, 1988b, 1989a, 1989b), we identified a number of community colleges in
California that are considered exemplary and that have high test score gains;
we visited two of them and interviewed four others by phone, as described in
Appendix B.
[49] Among the converts see, for example,
several of the authors in Literacy and the Marketplace (1989); Strumpf
et al. (1989); Askov, Aderman, and Hemmelstein (1989). For criticisms of
functional literacy--that is, the notion that literacy should be instrumental
to some narrow and often utilitarian goal--see Levine (1986) and Kazemek
(1985).
[50] See the results summarized in Figure 5 of
Sticht et al (1987), widely reported in other work by Sticht and his
colleagues. They are based on pre- and posttests with various control groups.
All results are converted to grade-level equivalents. The job-related reading
programs increased both job-related reading scores and general reading scores,
but so did the general literacy programs of both the Air Force and the Army;
and the scores of those without literacy training--who underwent several weeks
of technical training, which may itself have been a powerful literacy
program--also improved. In these results, it appears that gains in job-related
reading were largest in the job-related reading programs. However, without
information about the standard errors of test scores, about possible selection
effects (since participants in these programs differed in their initial scores,
and probably on other characteristics as well), and about the intensity and
content of programs, it is difficult to conclude that any one approach led to
larger gains than any other. Thus, it remains possible, based on this
evidence, that any approach to instruction increases scores, and the advantage
of functional context methods over others remains unclear. Elsewhere (p. 121)
this volume summarizes evidence from a functional context program called
Jobs-Oriented Basic Skills (JOBS), where attrition after thirty-three months on
the job of JOBS students was 6.8 percent compared to 14.8 percent for a
comparison group; but higher attrition at an earlier date among JOBS trainees
and a higher initial level of education means there are complex positive
selection effects influencing these results.
[51] Personal communication, Rena Soifer,
Eastern Michigan University Workplace Education Academy.
[52]The evaluation shows that CET has been
more effective than three other programs, but it cannot identify which of the
many differences among programs are responsible.
[53] For JTPA, this is a relatively long
program. Many on-the-job training programs last as little as six weeks, and
classroom-based skill programs rarely last longer than fifteen to twenty weeks.
[54]For a detailed account of the teaching
methods that can be used to teach generic skills as well as job-related skills,
see Stasz, McArthur, Lewis, and Ramsey (1991).
[55] However, there may be substantial
differences between the San Jose program and other CET programs. The satellite
program in Oakland was dominated much more by skills and drills methods when we
visited it, perhaps because it lacks the work components present in the San
Jose site. Thus, the CET "model" in practice varies in the balance of skills
and drills and other elements.
[56] Full-time work at $6 to $8 an hour leads
to annual earnings of $12,000 to $16,000, compared to the poverty level of
$7,500 for a single individual and $12,000 for a family of three in 1990.
However, most low-skilled workers suffer from irregular employment, so annual
earnings would typically be lower. The Rockefeller Foundation evaluation of CET
indicated that minority females completing the CET program earned an average of
$416 per month, or $4,992 per year with full-time work--and that this was
insufficient to reduce welfare income significantly. See Burghardt and Gordon
(1990), Appendix Table 2.
[57] Our examination of the Ohio program was
conducted as part of a study examining high school programs that integrate
vocational and academic education; see Grubb et al. (1991). There are obvious
conceptual links between remedial programs in vocational education and job
training programs and the efforts within high schools to integrate vocational
and academic education, particularly where integration efforts are essentially
remedial.
[58] It is crucial to point out that the Ohio
program does not use the better known applied academics courses--Principles of
Technology, Applied Academics, and Applied Communication--developed by the
Council for Occupational Research and Development (CORD) and the Agency for
Instructional Technology (AIT). In fact, the essence of the Ohio program is
that vocational and academic teachers work together to develop curriculum
materials; the Ohio teachers we interviewed denounced the notion of using
curriculum materials "off the shelf," and they found the CORD/AIT materials
inaccurate and too general for particular vocational areas.
[59] The principles underlying the program
have been presented in Soifer et al. (1990). However, this volume--which is
intended to be a manual for adult educators--does not describe classes in any
detail (though it does present the logic behind classroom practice) and does
not emphasize the sharp differences between its philosophy and methods and
those of more conventional adult education. Our description is based on a
two-day visit in August 1990.
[60] This motivation for incorporating
work-related material seems quite close to the contention within functional
context training that materials should be closely connected to work materials
and the skills necessary in employment. In practice, it might be impossible to
distinguish the two approaches. However, meaning-making approaches stress the
needs of workers while functional context approaches tend to stress the
needs of employers--for example, by asking employers about the skills
necessary in particular jobs.
[61] One reason for offering activities for
individuals, aside from the various schedules of adult workers, is apparently a
common conception within adult education--that it should be available as a
"drop-in service." The academy teachers feel that this is detrimental to good
programs because it fosters an attitude that students can drop it and work from
prepared curriculum materials, continuing the conventional approach of relying
on the teacher and curriculum materials and thinking of knowledge as
fragmented. In practice, the academy offers some individual activities and
tutoring, but teachers hope they will interest students in signing up for the
regular courses.
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| Grubb, W. N., Kalman, J., Castellano, M., Brown, C., & Bradby, D. (1991). Readin', writin' and 'rithmetic one more time: The role of remediation in vocational education and job training (MDS-309). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California. |
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