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Adult Education Forum

Most ABE teachers and administrators continue to place a great deal more emphasis on the development of reading, language and arithmetic skills than on such subjects as health education, consumer education, or &dquo;coping&dquo; skills (7). Increasingly, however, there is a recognition of the need to broaden the objectives of ABE instruction in order to make them more relevant to the immediate needs of participants and more germane to our mandate to foster economic independence and social participation. A major effort to identify needed adult performance skills in the areas of consumer practices, occupational knowledge, government and law; community resources, and health is under way at the University of Texas (Austin) under a grant from the Division of Adult Education, U.S.O.E. It is intended that the findings of this threeyear study will provide guidelines for developing new curricula in ABE. ABE teachers who place more emphasis on such subjects as health education, consumer education, and &dquo;coping&dquo; skills tend to have fewer dropouts and lower rates of absenteeism than teachers who stick to teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic (7). Thus a shift to adult performance skill objectives would appear to be important in meeting a critical concern of ABE program administrators, four-fifths of whom see student retention and student motivation as high priority problems (8). However, we should be wary of asserting that simply adopting these objectives will solve the problems of either program administrators concerned with recruitment and retention or undereducated adults concerned with improving the quality of their lives. Recent research by Darkenwald (2) and Boggs (1) bears out this skepticism. In analyzing retention and absentee rates reported by ABE teachers in large urban programs, Darkenwald found that among teach-