Notices by Stephanie Moore (stephaniemoore@mastodon.online)

@GottaLaff are they finally getting it?

Words on this post for scrubbing include Native American and indigenous. Many groups are being erased right now.

https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/113928960077922416

In the book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, there is a scene toward the end where 5,000 dead bodies are loaded onto a train and taken out of town. Over time people in the village think that number can’t possibly be that high, so the story over time erodes the details. First it’s less than 5,000, then a few hundred, then there were no bodies, then no massacre, then no train.

I’m thinking a lot these days about how fragile memory - and therefore history - really is and wondering what to do. /1

@inthehands I think this is a good example of how we need to shift from reliance solely on legal / logic arguments and engage in more narrative warfare and fight for the Overton window.

I’m announcing a policy of putting out only one fire per day. If you have a fire, take it elsewhere.

@dgoldsmith Of the 245 million eligible to vote, the largest portion didn’t vote - 36%. The remaining 64% were almost evenly split between R and D. The “horse race” reporting makes it seem like half the country when that’s not accurate. Over one third of the country is disaffected or disengaged (or encounters barriers). THAT is the space to work in.

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-15/how-many-people-didnt-vote-in-the-2024-election

As we face an incoming administration that demands loyalty, I keep thinking on how empty “loyalty” is as a construct. It’s not a two-way street, just a black hole that sucks things in. Even if you choose loyalty, like Zuckerberg and many news outlets already have, this institution will not love you back. Loyalty is not a winning strategy. It’s just what felt easiest.

So I’ve been using the same phone service for over 20 years. I know this because I get the “thank you for your loyalty” message whenever I login to my account to check or change things.

And it really makes me wonder about “loyalty.” I’m not actually loyal, just lazy. And they definitely aren’t loyal to me. There’s not a “loyalty discount” or any special sale that comes my way because of this. As Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out, the institution does not love you back. None of them do.

@inthehands boy that’s such a good non-example for survey design. I may use it for class?

As all professions and professionals - from health and medicine to law to technology and engineering to education to the humanities - are under attack, I wonder if we should band together not in our silos but across our disciplines and professional associations. No field should be left to defend itself. We are stronger together. I would love to see a coalition of professional bodies like AERA, NEA, MLA, IEEE, AMA, APA, and so on in defense of research and research-grounded practice and policy.

If anyone wants references, let me know. World Education and ProLiteracy have a LOT of resources and smart people working in this space, so they are great places to start.

Additionally, federal regulations have created some contradictory disincentives for programs working with adults with the highest literacy needs. Federal funding requires progress towards goals in a timely fashion, but the most struggling readers simply don’t progress that quickly. So adult basic literacy education may not be as fully supported by many programs.

In the state of New Mexico, for example, when I moved here a few years ago, the state budget for 21 adult education and literacy programs around state was just $900,000 total. That has gone up recently a little (I don’t know the new figure), but not nearly enough. And there are limitations with many of the programs’ models that require in-person (common across the US, not just NM programs).

If you’re looking for a systemic root cause to actually do something about besides just tweet a stat, you could hardly do better than adult literacy. Putting our shoulders to this plow - in the US and globally - could make a real difference! If you want to do something, you can volunteer at an adult ed center and learn research-anchored practices for teaching literacy (OR numeracy!). You can also support companies doing good work in this space like Learning Upgrade, Cell-Ed and Newsela.

Yes, it’s true that 54% of US adults struggle with reading, although the grade level equivalence is a dubious inference. I study this, so I want to share a few insights: namely that this trend isn’t unique to the US and better understanding the data has more implications than you may realize. /1

https://mastodon.world/@afouxenidis/113453002410321310

Implications for misinformation and disinformation are poorly studied (any mis/disinformation researcher out there wanting to partner on this, reach out). But we can certainly infer or hypothesize some things: 33% of US adults are at Level 2, meaning they will struggle with information across multiple sources. They can read WaPo, Guardian, local paper, etc. But sorting out nuance, differences, and meaning is difficult. That zone seems easy to flood with bad information.

The US is very middling in this data. PIAAC is a global measure (conducted every 10 years, so we are coming up on another data dump), and they compare data across countries.

So as you read a stat like this, I want you to understand: this isn’t unique to the US and thus isn’t indicative of a challenge unique to the US. There is a reason educational access is one of UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal. Additionally, women and POC are over-represented in the data, unsurprisingly.

Technically, 54% of US adults read at Level 2 or lower as measured by PIAAC. (While grade equivalence claims are common, it’s not backed by any data, so many of us are abandoning that phrasing … plus what “6th grade” means is vague and cultural).

A better way to understand this is that a reader at Level 2 has trouble making meaning across multiple texts, especially if those texts contradict each other. Level 1 means they have difficulty accessing information via text.

In the meantime, *that still leaves 54% of adults in the here and now.* We don’t have stats on the comparisons of funding for k-12 literacy to adult. We do have adult ed programs in every state, but some states have more funding, and ProLiteracy regularly estimates that only 10% of adults who would benefit access those services - for a host of systemic, intertwining reasons like transportation, work schedules, child care, and other access barriers.

are too difficult to access. The remainder of that 54% score below Level 1 or cannot be tested for some reason (eg a cognitive impairment, etc).

So, many adults take in their information aurally - enter television, YouTube, TikTok, etc.

… Why don’t we invest in adult education and literacy? Well, we do, but it is substantially under-funded compared to K-12. And the logic goes (you might be going down this road yourself) … if we start young then we address the root cause. Yes, BUT …