Tracking Adult Literacy and Numeracy Skills

Findings from Longitudinal Research

Stephen Reder, John Bynner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135903299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Understanding the origins of poor literacy and numeracy skills in adulthood and how to improve them is of major importance when society places a high premium on proficiency in these basic skills. This edited collection brings together the results of recent longitudinal studies that greatly extend our knowledge of what works in raising skill levels, as well as the social and economic returns to improvement.

Many fundamental research questions in adult education involve change over time: how adults learn, how program participation influences their acquisition of skills and knowledge, and how their educational development interacts with their social and economic performance. Although a growing number of longitudinal studies in adult basic education have recently been completed, this book is the first systematic compilation of findings and methods.

Triangulating findings from different methodological perspectives and research designs, and across countries, this text produces convergence on key conclusions about the role of basic skills in the modern life course and the most effective ways of enhancing them.

Part I

Literacy and Numeracy Development

1 Insights into Basic Skills from a UK Longitudinal Study

John Bynner and Samantha Parsons

BACKGROUND

The work reported here took place against the background of a major new initiative in Britain, both to understand and to tackle the problem of poor basic skills in a substantial minority of the adult population. Concerns were driven by the growing body of evidence that basic skills difficulties were a major impediment to successful functioning in modern society culminating in the work of the UK Government’s Moser Committee¹ and the ongoing policy development that arose from it, Skills for Life (SfL). This included defining national standards for adult literacy and numeracy. These map the range of literacy and numeracy skills and capabilities that adults are assumed to need in order to function effectively in the workplace, in the family, and in the community. A separate set of standards has been produced for literacy and numeracy.

Literacy covers the ability to	Numeracy covers the ability to
• speak, listen, and respond	• understand and use mathematical information
• read and comprehend	• calculate and manipulate mathematical information
• write to communicate	• interpret results and communicate mathematical information

The national standards for adult literacy and numeracy, as set down in the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), are specified at three levels: Entry, Level 1 and Level 2. Entry is further divided into three sublevels: Entry 1, Entry 2, and Entry 3 to specify in detail the small steps required for adults to make progress in response to basic skills educational provision. Full details of the curriculum content expected to be mastered at each level are shown in Appendices 1.A.1 and 1.A.2.

An important part of the evidence considered by Moser was drawn from basic skills data collected for the UK Basic Skills Agency in what was then a twelve-year program of longitudinal research. The program was focused particularly on identifying the earlier circumstances and experiences, which were connected with later basic skills difficulties. This work was based on the 1958 and 1970 British birth-cohort studies, known, respectively, as the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), the second of which supplies the findings reported in this chapter. NCDS and BCS70 are longitudinal studies that follow up all babies born in Great Britain in a single week from birth in the year the study began to adulthood, with new data collected at regular intervals throughout the cohorts’ lives. Much of the earlier work was based on findings from the literacy and numeracy objective assessments that were conducted on 10 percent representative subsamples of the cohorts, first at age twenty-one in BCS70 (1991) and later, at age thirty-seven in NCDS (1997).

As part of the SfL strategy, the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC) was established. This offered the opportunity to increase the potential of the cohort studies for basic skills research with a particular focus on the socioeconomic consequences in adulthood of poor acquisition of the basic skills. This was subsequently extended to “profiling” in terms of early circumstances and experience individuals of at the lowest (Entry) skills levels. In 2004 the latest follow-up surveys of NCDS and BCS70 funded by the Economic and Social Research Council were due to take place. With additional funding from NRDC, new literacy and numeracy assessments were completed by all BCS70 cohort members at age thirty-four. Assessment of symptoms associated with dyslexia was also included. In addition, funding from the European Social Fund (ESF) supported a study of intergenerational continuities in basic skills acquisition, through an assessment of the reading and mathematical skills of all resident natural or adopted children from a randomly selected one in two sample of cohort members.²

This policy thrust in basic skills assessment in the birth cohorts both maps into and is informed by the broader life-course perspective (Elder, 1998; Heinz, 1991) to which design and analysis in the studies are directed (Bynner, Butler, Ferri, Shepherd & Smith, 2000). Within this conceptual framework the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills supports the development of personal agency in building personal resources that will enable the individual to progress along the pathways toward achievement and fulfilling outcomes in the different domains of adult life: education, employment, family, citizenship. These pathways are shaped by the culturally based institutional frameworks in place to mediate and moderate the transitions to outcomes in adult life involved, including entry to school, to work, to partnership, to parenthood, to active citizenship and are themselves changing in response to economic and social change.

A particular concern in modern industrial societies is the impact of economic transformation on the nature of employment and employability in a labor market that places an increasing premium on skills and qualifications. In these terms individuals lacking the core skills of literacy, numeracy, and increasingly information and communication technology (ICT) face the risk of “social exclusion”: that is to say, adult life marked by restricted life chances typified by casual unfulfilling work and unemployment and often accompanied by psychological and physical health problems, drug and alcohol abuse (Bynner, 2004). A major aim of SfL strategy, taken forward in 2007 by the report of the government-commissioned Leitch Committee, Prosperity for All in the Global Economy, is to find the means of bridging the skills gap.³

Experience in the family and in the early stages of life can work with, or be out of step with, schooling and educational progress, as can later experience in the workplace and the community. Skills supply the basic protective resources on which successful achievement in adult life is likely to be based, and at the core of these resources lie literacy and numeracy without which progress is likely to be impeded. Thus, adults whose developmental pathways to adult life are characterized by poor literacy and poor numeracy face increasing risk of marginalization and social exclusion. The main route to this status of particular concern to British policymakers is for young people not to be in education, employment, or training (NEET) in the critical period of the late teens (Bynner & Parsons, 2002).

THE BIRTH-COHORT STUDIES

As we have made clear, the study of basic skills has been a prominent feature of the major longitudinal studies carried out in Britain for some time (for an overview, see Bynner & Joshi, 2007). The Birth Cohort Study Series began in 1946 with a one-third sample of all babies born in a particular week and followed up through adult life. The model was replicated with further birth-cohort studies, one of which is the focus of this chapter, embracing the whole sample of one week’s births in 1958 and 1970 with about 17,000 individuals initially in each study. Following the collection of comprehensive information surrounding the circumstances of birth, data were collected in a series of follow-up surveys (“sweeps”) at ages seven, eleven, sixteen, twenty-three, thirty-three, forty-six (1958 cohort) and at ages five, ten, sixteen, twenty-six, thirty, thirty-four (1970 cohort). There was then a gap of thirty years before the most recent national birth-cohort study began in the millennium year, this time based on a whole year’s births and starting with a sample of nineteen thousand stratified to overrepresent those growing up in disadvantaged circumstances and in areas with high concentrations of ethnic minorities.

Response has held up remarkably well across the different sweeps in each of the studies (Plewis, Calderwood, Hawkes, & Nathan, 2004). Thus, in the year 2000, when the 1958 cohort had reached age forty-two and the 1970 cohort, age thirty, response rates based on eligible members of the original cohort (i.e. excluding deaths and emigrants) were 73 percent and 70 percent, respectively.

In the 2004 BCS70 survey the response rate dropped significantly through unanticipated mobility of cohort members to 9,665 participants, 63 percent. Small biases are evident, with females and the more educated slightly more likely to stay in the study than their male and less educated counterparts, but overall the participating samples remain representative of the cohort at birth.

Design

Each of the studies adopts the life-course perspective attempting to embrace holistically the course of human development with data collected relevant to the particular stage of life reached as shown in Figure 1.1.

In the early years the focus was on home circumstances, parental attitudes and behaviors, and the behavioral and cognitive development of the cohort members. Through the preschool and school years, educational achievement was brought into the picture, together with information collected about the context of schooling supplied by teachers. In the teenage years the cohort members themselves supplied the data, with, in the case of the 1970 cohort at age sixteen, extensive questionnaire coverage of all facets of their educational and leisure lives. In adulthood the emphasis moved to participation in the labor market and the other domains of adult life, including partnership, family formation, housing, and citizenship. Health, well-being and health-related behavior, have also been a recurrent theme throughout.

Figure 1.1 1970 cohort longitudinal design from 1970–2004.

Although reading attainment and maths attainment assessed through educational and cognitive tests featured through the childhood years with measures taken at ages five, ten, sixteen (1970 cohort) and at ages seven, eleven, and sixteen (1958 cohort), the objective assessment of adult skills (as opposed to self-reports) did not begin until 1991, when a 10 percent sample of the 1970 cohort at age twenty-one years completed tests of functional literacy and numeracy (Bynner & Steedman, 1995; Ekinsmyth & Bynner, 1994). The exercise was repeated with a similarly designed test at age thirty-seven for a 10 percent representative sample of the 1958 cohort (Bynner & Parsons, 1997; Parsons & Bynner, 1998). As already noted, it was not until 2004, when the opportunity arose through the SfL program and the establishment of the NRDC, that a full assessment of literacy and numeracy in a whole cohort was possible—the 1970 cohort at age thirty-four.⁴ The assessment, funded by NRDC, comprised forty-seven multiple-choice computer-administered test items at the different National Qualifications Framework (NQF) levels selected from the 2002–2003 National SfL Survey of Adult Basic Skills. This survey was carried out to assess the general public’s basic skills problems (Williams, Clemens, Oleinikova & Tarvin, 2003). Full details of the BCS70 test are supplied in Parsons and Bynner (2005).

For purposes of continuity, the multiple-choice assessment was coupled with a second “open response” interview–administered assessment comprising test items used in the previous age twenty-one 1970 cohort study follow-up. Out of a one and a half hour interview the literacy and numeracy tests took on average twenty minutes to complete. Apart from the literacy and numeracy assessment, the survey also embraced cohort members’ current employment, income, and family situation and history back to the previous survey in 2000 for employment, partnership and family formation and housing. Health and well-being and civic participation were also extensively covered.

Following the design of the 1958 cohort age thirty-three sweep, this survey also extended data collection to one-half of the cohort members’ children, supplying an intergenerational data set with comparable measures of cohort members’ basic skills when they were children to those of their own children (see Bynner & Parsons, 2006). This replicated in part the design of the 1958 cohort follow-up at age thirty-three, when one-third of the cohort members’ children were assessed. Notably, the expansion of the sample from one-third, 1958 cohort, to one-half, 1970 cohort, proved necessary to compensate for the delayed child bearing of the more recent cohort.

Analysis approach

Embedding adult basic skills assessments in multipurpose longitudinal surveys of the birth-cohort studies kind has particular value, in enabling research to trace the origins of adult basic skills difficulties t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Need for Longitudinal Studies in Adult Literacy and Numeracy Education
• Part I: Literacy and Numeracy Development
• Part II: Student, Teacher, and Classroom Studies
• Part III: The Impact of Policy and Programs
• Part IV: Social and Economic Outcomes in Context
• Contributors