The Adult Literacy and Adult Education SIG (ALAE) is dedicated to research, development, policy, and practice in adult literacy and adult education. The group takes an interdisciplinary, lifespan perspective on learning and instruction among diverse populations.
The Adult Literacy and Adult Education (ALAE) SIG is one of the few places in AERA to connect with researchers working with adult populations. We also offer opportunities to be a part of the community of adult education researchers, to meet people who work with or have connections to institutions that fund research, hire adult education researchers, and publish adult education manuscripts. We are always growing our vibrant scholarly community. Please invite your colleagues and graduate students to join our SIG. If you are not already an AERA member, go to the website. Be sure to select the ALAE membership ($10). If you are already an AERA member, you can update your existing membership online through the AERA site and by selecting our Special Interest Group as one of your SIGs (note: we are ALAE SIG #4).
As your elected officers, we look forward to serving you and the field!
Thank you to all who served as reviewers for the 2025 AERA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado! We are looking forward to the annual conference and hope you will join us for the SIG Business Meeting on Saturday, April 26th at 7-8:30pm MDT.
Please remember to keep checking this ALAE SIG webpage for ongoing updates. We always invite everyone in the SIG to e-mail us (etighe@gsu.edu) something special that happened in the past month related to their work or exciting announcements. Please share big things - like being awarded a large grant, an appointment as a journal editor or editor of a book, or a call for manuscripts. Also, please consider sharing smaller things like an excellent article or a question for the group you would like to share.
We sincerely appreciate your consideration and input, and we look forward to serving you while learning with/from you!
Elizabeth Tighe
ALAE SIG Chair
Meet the ALAE Leadership Team:
Elizabeth L. Tighe is the new ALAE Chair and is looking forward to an exciting 2025 Annual Meeting. Liz is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the Assistant Director of the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University (GSU). Her research focuses on the literacy skills and instructional needs of struggling adult readers. She has published and presented work on individual differences in adults’ component reading skills, assessment and measurement of reading constructs, classification of learning disabilities, and using educational technology in adult literacy classrooms. Her work has been funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, National Institutes of Health, and AERA. She has also tutored in multiple adult literacy classrooms in Florida and Massachusetts and has also taught high school equivalency courses in Arizona.
Amy Pickard is the new Program Chair. Amy is an Assistant Professor of Adult Education ar Indiana University Bloomington. She is a qualitative researcher whose interests center on policy, equity and adult literacy education. As a former adult literacy and ABE teacher, she is interested in supporting adult learners to define their own learning needs and improving policy and programs to better meet these needs. She is particularly interested in systems-level understandings of ABE, reading and writing instruction in ABE spaces, self-directed learning of ABE students, and digital engagement of ABE teachers and adult learners.
Lindsay McHolme is the new Secretary/Treasurer. Lindsay is an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Georgia State University’s (GSU) Adult Literacy Research Center (ALRC). Her community-engaged research focuses on multilingual education in adult and secondary spaces. She holds a professional teaching certificate in secondary English Language Arts with a certification in ESOL and has taught ABE and ELL adult learners in multiple settings in Michigan, high school EFL at a Spanish/English bilingual school in Honduras, and middle school ELA at a Spanish/English bilingual school in Michigan. She was also the director of a county-wide literacy coalition for all ages for several years, emphasizing the impact of community-engaged scholarship.
Jennifer Kobrin is the chair of the ALAE Awards Committee. Jen is an Assistant Professor of Adult and Continuing Education at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research focuses on how technology mediates the learning and literacy practices of adults, primarily in the context of Adult Foundational Education. Most recently, she explored adult job seekers’ adaptive literacy practices as they navigated across a variety of technology platforms, non-profit agencies, and government institutions. Jen also worked for decades as a practitioner in K-12 and adult education, most recently as Director of Digital Inclusion at the Office of Adult Education, City of Philadelphia.
Margaret Patterson is the incoming Webmaster. Margaret is a Senior Researcher with Research Allies for Lifelong Learning in Virginia (www.researchallies.org). She has served in an ALAE SIG officer role for more than a decade and looks forward to keeping you informed about the latest SIG happenings.
Ascendium has approved over $58 million in grants to enhance postsecondary education and workforce training for learners from low-income backgrounds. The funding supports community college workforce initiatives, strengthens institutional capacities, backs high-quality sectoral training programs, promotes evidence-based practices, and expands postsecondary education in prison. These investments target the removal of structural barriers and fostering of equitable opportunities for student success.
An exciting Message from IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement):
Are you interested in large-scale assessments?
Some words about the ILSA Gateway: It is an open-access platform that, for the first time, provides researchers a single entry point to major international large-scale assessments in education conducted by the following organizations: CONFEMEN (PASEC), the IDB (PRIDI), the IEA (ICCS, ICILS, PIRLS, TEDS-M, and TIMSS), IEA/UNESCO (REDS), the OECD (IELS, PIAAC, PISA, TALIS, and TALIS Starting Strong), SACMEQ (SACMEQ III, SACMEQ IV), SEAMEO/UNICEF (SEA-PLM), UNESCO (TERCE), and the World Bank (STEP).
For each study, users can navigate to a fact sheet that provides a quick overview; read more detailed information on the study framework, design, results, and data pages; and easily access the related resources on the external study websites. The platform also features a glossary, search tool, and paper database, of which the latter allows researchers to identify relevant articles published to date in peer-reviewed journals, including secondary analyses of the above-mentioned study data.
The website is available at https://ilsa-gateway.org/.
Download the ILSA Gateway brochure on:
https://ilsa-gateway.org/sites/default/files/ILSA_Gateway_Flyer.pdf
A BIG thanks to ProLiteracy for sponsoring our SIG awards. Their support is greatly appreciated. Please visit ProLiteracy at https://www.proliteracy.org/ to learn about the great work they're doing in adult basic education. Submissions to their peer reviewed journal, Adult Literacy Education: The International Journal of Literacy, Language, and Numeracy, are always welcome: https://www.proliteracy.org/ale-journal
Let's Keep in Touch!
Chair: Elizabeth Tighe, Ph.D. (etighe@gsu.edu)
Program Chair: Amy Pickard (Pickard@iu.edu)
Secretary/Treasurer: Lindsay McHolme (lmcholme@gsu.edu)
SIG Webmaster: Margaret Patterson, Ph.D. (margaret@researchallies.org)
The PIAAC conference will be May 8 and 9 at Georgetown University! We are extending poster submissions for the PIAAC conference to the same time as registration, April 20.
Ascendium supports research that overcomes structural barriers to postsecondary education.
For more information, please see the Grants section below.