From Research to Practice in Adult Basic Education. Final Project Report.

The strategies whereby relevant findings and implications of empirical research could become known to and employed by adult basic education practitioners in solving their problems are demonstrated. Efforts were made to: (1) Identify significant problems in the practice of adult basic education; (2) Conduct a thorough search of the research literature in the social sciences relevant to such problems; and (3) Develop and disseminate a series of monographs which would translate the findings of research and suggest solutions to problems in a manner which is meaningful to practitioners. To accomplish these tasks, job descriptions were developed, a nine-member staff employed, a project task analysis performed, criteria for selecting writers devised, and a conceptual system to facilitate a uniform approach to the definition and analysis of problems developed. The staff read 3,000 reports and made a survey of all members of the Commission of Professors of Adult Education and the Special Project Directors to detect research recently conducted. Findings include: (1) Ten monographs which relate research to practice can be produced in a twelve-month period with the resources made available in this project; (2) Problems reported by practitioners and researchers are often imprecisely defined and analyzed; (3) Practitioners tend to attribute problems to lack of financial and physical resources or to some uncontrollable conditions rather than to a lack of capability or knowledge on their part. (Author/CK)