Adult Literacy Research Center

Digital literacy is the knowledge and skills that we use to access, understand, and use technology – devices, software, the internet – to not only work or get things done, but to problem solve, pool knowledge, and understand the world around us as well.  Many adults do not have access to technology or the internet; many others do not have adequate skills to use the technology.

Examples of our current and past research projects in involving digital literacy include:

Do Information Technologies Help Reduce Discrimination? Public Sector Natural Field Experiments in a Developing Country (Alberto Chong, Ph.D.). In this project, researchers take advantage of a natural experiment in Bolivia, a country were all adult citizens must have national ID cards.  While the authors show that staff that has access to information technologies is more productive, they also show that they are less prone to ask for bribes. The reason for the latter is that information technologies reduce discretionality of employees, for instance, they are unable to claim that the documentation “got lost” and that effort (and money) would be needed to find the documents.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Randomized Controlled Trials in Latin America (Alberto Chong, Ph.D.). This is a book that collects a series of randomized controlled trials and quasi experimental exercises in several countries of Latin America. The authors provide a broad discussion of their ICT interventions, which range from radio programs in rural areas, to text messages to remind people to save money. This research shows the conditions by which ICTs can be useful in developing areas, and in particular in Latin America.

Adaptive Educational Technologies for Literacy Instruction (Scott Crossley, Ph.D.). These projects focus on developing educational technologies that adapt to the students’ needs and abilities. The projects focus on providing strategy training to students to help increase literacy skills such as persuasive writing and text comprehension.

The Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Text Cohesion (TAACO): Automatic Assessment of Local, Global, and Text Cohesion (Scott Crossley, Ph.D.). A number of natural language processing (NLP) tools have been developed at Georgia State to automatically analyze texts. These tools focus on linguistic features related to text cohesion, lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and sentiment analysis. The tools can be used to better understand qualities of text related to literacy such as writing quality, text readability, and text comprehensibility.

Doctor-Patient Discourse in On-Line Email Diabetes Care (Scott Crossley, Ph.D.). The purpose of this project is to develop and validate a novel, automated linguistic complexity profile (LCP) to assess secure message content generated by English-speaking type 2 diabetes patients and their providers. The goal of the project is to create an automated, LCP-based prototype that delivers feedback to providers on the linguistic complexity of their secure messages in order to better align providers’ messages to their patients’ literacy.

Health information seeking behaviors in technology rich environments (Iris Feinberg, Ph.D.). This paper presents data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies with a focus on the interrelationships among health information seeking behavior (HISB), and health status or use of preventive health measures for U.S. adults both with and without a high school diploma. A key finding is that the Internet appears to play a key role in both enhancing health status and enabling use of preventive measures for those with and without a high school diploma; although, individuals without a high school diploma who use the Internet for health information derive substantial benefit in health status.

Developing Instructional Approaches Suited to the Cognitive and Motivational Needs of Struggling Adult Readers (Daphne Greenberg, Ph.D.). AutoTutor is an intelligent tutoring system on the web that delivers comprehension instruction. It includes conversational pedagogical agents that motivate and navigate the learner through learning lessons and activities. The system includes adaptive conversational trialogues with two animated conversational agents (teacher and student) that interact with the adult learner in each AutoTutor lesson. The curriculum has 35 lessons with trialogues that cover specific comprehension strategies. The system collects student performance on each item within each lesson for use by the students’ teachers.

AutoTutor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNyIdlrcGzY

Family Literacy is a term that describes intergenerational learning, where parents and children – or other adults and children – learn together. Strategies used in family literacy combine the effects of early childhood literacy interventions, early parenting interventions, adult literacy, and enhanced parental/adult support. Family literacy draws from academic traditions such as adult literacy, emergent literacy, special education, early childhood development, cognitive psychology and parental education.

An example of our work in Family Literacy is Project Healthy Grandparents, run by Dr. Susan Kelly in the School of Nursing and Health Professions. Project Healthy Grandparents is a community-based research program that tests the efficacy of an interdisciplinary intervention to improve the well-being of families where grandparents are raising their grandchildren in parent-absent households. Sometimes grandparents need help with their own literacy skills and are referred to adult literacy programs. Increasing grandparent literacy skills helps them be better able to care for themselves and their families.

Financial literacy is the opportunity for parents and children to learn together to improve intergenerational literacy.

Health literacy refers to how people get, understand and use health information. This refers to both an individual’s ability to use knowledge and skills and to how providers like medical professionals, health educators and others provide health information.

Examples of our current and past research projects involving health literacy include:

Stroke Counseling for Risk Reduction (SCORRE) in Young Adult African Americans (Dawn Aycock, Ph.D.). This study looks at refining and testing a tailored, theory-based intervention designed to increase awareness of stroke and improve lifestyle behaviors to reduce stroke risk in young adult African Americans.

Doctor-Patient Discourse in On-Line Email Diabetes Care (Scott Crossley, Ph.D.). The purpose of this project is to develop and validate an automated system to analyze emails between patients who have Type-2 Diabetes and their providers. The system will be able to deliver feedback to providers on how complex their email messages are in order to better align theses messages to their patients’ literacy levels.

Health Information Seeking Behaviors in Technology Rich Environments (Iris Feinberg, Ph.D., Daphne Greenberg, Ph.D.). This research project analyzes data from the program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) with a focus on the interrelationships between health information seeking behaviors and health status or use of preventive health measures for adults without a high school diploma. Findings indicate that individuals without a high school diploma who use the Internet for health information have substantially better health status than those who do not use the Internet.

Employee Engagement in Wellness Programs (Iris Feinberg, Ph.D., Daphne Greenberg, Ph.D., Michael Price, Ph.D.). This project looks at the relationships between reading, numeracy, digital and health insurance literacies as they relate to the knowledge of and use of workplace wellness programs.

SafeCare Health Literacy Research (Iris Feinberg, Ph.D.). This project analyzes the relationship between literacy levels of new mothers who are part of the SafeCare home visitation program in relation to their understanding and use of the SafeCare health manual and health booklet.

Patient Centeredness in an Urban Diabetes Clinic (Iris Feinberg, Ph.D.). This study analyzes audio taped interactions between patients and health providers to evaluate patient centeredness of providers and to assess if patient centeredness is related to health outcomes.

Evaluating the Availability and Scope of HIV Prevention, Treatment and Supports for Individuals with Intellectual, Developmental, and Significant Learning Disabilities (Andrew Roach, Ph.D.). This research conducts a community-based evaluation focused on the availability and quality of HIV/AIDS prevention services for individuals with intellectual, developmental and significant learning disabilities in the Atlanta metro area. Multiple stakeholder groups will be engaged as part of this project, including individuals living with HIV or AIDS, persons with disabilities, family members and leaders and employees from HIV/AIDS and disability service providers.

Workforce and workplace literacy refers to the ability to possess the reading, writing, numeracy and communication skills needed on the job. This includes skills to fill out job applications, succeed in interviews or screenings, read and understand written procedures and manuals and maintain a job.

Examples of our current and past research projects involving workforce and workplace literacy include:

Voluntary Training and Adult Competency Outcomes in a Cross Section of Countries (Alberto Chong, Ph.D.). The purpose of this study is to understand the association between voluntary training and adult competencies in literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology rich environments. Examining voluntary training and its impact on adult competency can reveal important insights on the role that innate motivation, as opposed to mandatory training participation, can play in adult cognitive abilities. Results from the study can help inform training participation policies which may lead to an increase in training effectiveness.

Georgia Pathways to Work: Explore-Engage-Employ (Andrew Roach, Ph.D.). The purpose of this project is to improve career-focused transition services for young Georgians (ages 14-24) who are eligible for Vocational Rehabilitation services. The project aims to increase the number of customized career pathways available to students and young adults with disabilities, the number of youth and young adults with disabilities who achieve competitive integrated employment and the average weekly wage and employer benefits achieved by youth and young adults with disabilities who enter the workforce.