Group items tagged

Results from the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics have been used to suggest there is a crisis in the literacy and numeracy skills of Australian adults. This study challenges this current view by looking at the issue from a worker's perspective. Production workers, together with their managers and trainers, from three manufacturing companies were interviewed and observed. Little evidence of a direct link between increasing literacy and numeracy skills of workers and improved productivity was found.

Designed for use in the US (mapped against the Common Core State Standards, which groups things into six concept areas: Number and Quantity, Algebra, Functions, Modeling, Geometry, and Statistics and Probability), and designed to cover the equivalent of a year-long, traditional school curriculum. Worth poking about in. Comments from IOE and OCR particularly welcome.

[48 p PDF], and worth looking at thoroughtly. Excerpt: "The statistical model found that measures of student effort trump all other variables tested for their relationships to student success, including demographic descriptions of the students, course subject matter and student use of support services. The clearest predictor of passing a course is the number of problem sets a student submitted. The relationship between completion of problem sets and success is not linear; rather the positive effect increases dramatically after a certain baseline of effort has been made. Video Time, another measure of effort, was also found to have a strong positive relationship with passing, particularly for Stat 95 students."

Several angles of interest on this, from our own perspective (as prospective uses of data) and that of our prospective learners