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. 
 

JOIN OUR SIG

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 over the next two years!

First, thank you for those who have already volunteered to serve as reviewers for the 2025 AERA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado! We are seeking additional volunteers to serve as reviewers. This is a great way to get involved in the SIG and a valuable service opportunity, especially for early career scholars. We encourage any SIG members to volunteer as your expertise and feedback really helps shape the content year-to-year. Depending on the volume of submissions, reviewers can expect anywhere from 5-10 (it cannot exceed 10!) submissions to review. These reviews will take place during a 3-week period (August-September).

If you are a current member, to sign-up, to volunteer, please visit www.aera.net, sign into your account, click on “My AERA”, and scroll down to click “2025 AERA Annual Meeting – Volunteer to be a Reviewer”. From there, under “General Menu”, you will complete a short form that our program chair will use to help assign relevant submissions to you. Make sure once you submit the form you also selected the ALAE SIG from the list of reviewer options. Please be sure to indicate your area(s) of expertise and interest so our new Program Chair, Dr. Amy Pickard can match you with appropriate proposals.

Second, the call for proposals for the 2025 AERA Annual Meeting is now open (submissions due July 26, 2024) and we highly encourage submissions to the SIG. Submissions can be more traditional symposia, roundtable presentations, and posters and we also have had some very exciting workshops and an off-site visit to an adult education program in Philadelphia at the last annual meeting, which was also a great way to get to know other SIG members.

Finally, we want to let you know that we will be sending out monthly updates/information (e.g., job ads, relevant grant proposal calls, and anything anyone wants to share). You will also see job ads and relevant grant calls posted to our ALAE SIG webpage (https://www.aera.net/SIG004/Adult-Literacy-Adult-Education-SIG-4). We invite everyone in the SIG to e-mail us (etighe@gsu.edu) something special that happened in the past month related to their work. Please share big things - like being awarded a large grant, an appointment as a journal editor or editor of a book, a call for manuscripts, or a call for a job. Also, please consider sharing smaller things like an excellent article or a question for the group you would like to share.

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.

We sincerely appreciate your consideration and input, and we look forward to serving you while learning with/from you!

Elizabeth Tighe

ALAE SIG Chair  

Transformative Research in the Education Sciences and Using Longitudinal Data To Support State Education Policymaking Grant Programs

The Institute of Science (IES) National Center for Education Research (NCER) is inviting applications, due August 15, 2024, for new awards for fiscal year (FY) 2025 for the Education Research Grant Programs. 

Using Longitudinal Data to Support State Education Policymaking (ALN 84.305S). Under this competition, NCER will only consider applications that address State agencies' use of their State's education longitudinal data systems to identify and reduce opportunity and achievement gaps for learners from prekindergarten through adult education.

Transformative Research in the Education Sciences (ALN 84.305T). Through this program, IES seeks to support innovative research that has the potential to make dramatic advances towards solving seemingly intractable problems and challenges in the education field and/or to accelerate the pace of conducting education research to facilitate major breakthroughs. For the FY 2025 competition, the Transformative Research in the Education Sciences grant program will focus on accelerating learning and reducing persistent education inequities by leveraging evidence-based principles from the learning sciences, coupled with advanced technology to create high-reward, scalable technology solutions.

Education Research and Special Education Research Grant Programs

NCER is also inviting applications, due September 12, 2024, for new awards for fiscal year (FY) 2025 for the Education Research and Special Education Research Grant Programs. IES intends to provide national leadership in expanding knowledge and understanding of (1) developmental and school readiness outcomes for infants and toddlers with or at risk for a disability, (2) education outcomes for all learners from early childhood education through postsecondary and adult education, and (3) employment and wage outcomes when relevant (such as for those engaged in career and technical, postsecondary, or adult education). 

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