Report on ACAL 2014 conference Keynote

ACAL Keynote Professor Stephen Reder

Professor Stephen Reder’s research takes a longitudinal perspective and examines how formal education programs fit into the lives of adult learners. This approach reverses the usual approach to educational research and program evaluation which generally focuses on the way that students fit into programs.

Professor Reder’s Keynote address at the recent ACAL conference in the Gold Coast can be found in PowerPoint form

Here is the website for the Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning (LSAL)

The LSAL research followed almost 1000 early school leavers aged from 18 – 44 at the beginning of the study. The research analyses the relationship between adults’ participation in formal programs and their self-study efforts and what happens to their literacy scores (a proficiency measure) and the wider impacts on their life-long and life-wide literacy development and use.

The research is highly technical, but some of the key findings include:

  • People who participate in both formal programs and self-study activities achieve greater proficiency and greater economic gain (an increase over non-participants of an annual income of US $9000 – $10,000). These gains happen over time.
  • These long term beneficial effects are not evident in short term accountability measures for programs, but the short-term measures that programs are forced to use are the ones they must use to program improvement.

Margaret McHugh