Chapter 7
Functional Context Education Case Study #1: The Functional Literacy (FLIT) Program

Scenario: When a large organization switched from "general" to job-related literacy programs hundreds of thousands of young adults improved their ability to perform job reading tasks 3 to 5 times as much as they had in the ''general'' literacy program.

The Department of Defense is one organization that has had a long term interest in finding cost-effective ways to improve its recruitment function so that it may profitably utilize a wider share of the young adult population for entry level jobs. Though in the last decade, the military has been able to raise its qualify standards, methods developed in earlier research and development projects have made it possible to integrate literacy and job training when it becomes necessary to Utilize less educated recruits. By integrating basic skills training with job skills training, both are accomplished at less expense than is necessary when separate programs are used.

The Functional Literacy (FLIT) Program. In research on reading skills for the US. Army it was determined that, for someone to be able lo read and comprehend in a given content area, such as a technical job, they must have some considerable prior knowledge about what they are reading. For instance, it was found that the personnel who scored high on tests of general reading ability did so because they had higher levels of vocabulary, and they knew a lot about a wide variety of subjects. For this reason, personnel with higher levels of general reading were able to draw on their broad-based prior knowledge for reading and learning from job training materials.

However, it is also the case that it takes a long time to develop large bodies of prior knowledge that can be drawn on to read and comprehend job technical materials. For instance, it takes the typical high school level reader twelve years, in and out of school, to develop twelfth-grade reading skills.

If adults need to learn to read job materials, and they have only a limited amount of time to learn it - because time in training: counts against productivity - then it is not possible to develop large bodies of general knowledge that will help them read job materials, However, by focusing the reading training on the contents and learning demands of the job field for which employees are being prepared it is possible to develop a fair amount of competence in both reading skills and job knowledge. This was the basis for the Army's Functional Literacy (FLIT) program.

FUNCTIONAL CONTEXT EDUCATION (FCE)

As discussed above, Functional Context Education (FCE) concepts and principles have been used to design programs for teaching basic skills and job technical knowledge together However, the approach is more general. It is based on findings from research showing that a person can learn to read, write, or compute while working with job-related or other content material, such as parenting books. It is not necessary to first learn to read, as a sort of content-free process skill, before one starts to read to learn important content. This is particularly true for those adults with basic skills at or above the 5th grade level.

Using FCE, reading, writing and mathematics skills are taught using materials that present content knowledge that is Important to the adult learner. If the content knowledge that is desired is job-related. such as learning an office, automotive, or other job, then literacy and mathematics are taught using materials about the different jobs.