Hands-on Development Strategies in a Content-Centered Context for Young and Adult Learners with Poor Basic Skills in Literacy and Numeracy Erasmus Project

Project Title

Hands-on Development Strategies in a Content-Centered Context for Young and Adult Learners with Poor Basic Skills in Literacy and Numeracy

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships addressing more than one field

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education

Project Summary

Hands-on Development Strategies in a Content-Centered Context for Young and Adult Learners with Poor Basic Skills in Literacy and Numeracy

Participants:
Országos Tranzitfoglalkoztatási Egyesület – Debrecen, Hungary
Klaipeda State College – Klaipeda, Lithuania
Teachers Training Center – Tulcea, Romania
C.I.F.P. Medina del Campo – Medina del Campo, Spain
Edirne Teknik ve Endüstri Veslek Lisesi – Edirne, Turkey

In Europe, approximately 20% of the young generation is not equipped with the necessary basic skills in literacy and numeracy. Moreover, 25 % of European adults has low literacy and numeracy skills (http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/school/math_en.htm ).
The five countries involved in this project face a common problem. As it can be seen in the results of PISA 2012 (http://www.oecd.org/pisa) all participant countries’ performance in mathematics, reading and science remains below the OECD average. Moreover, three of them are significantly below the OECD average in creative problem solving (there are no data about Lithuania and Romania).

A thorough analysis of research results from all over the world revealed that the basic problem is the absence of the preconditions for successful acquisition, the lack of critical skills in literacy as well as in numeracy. Researches point out that developing literacy and numeracy skills through teaching content can be effective (more details: in the next question). (Center for Research on Learning and Instruction, http://www.edu.u-szeged.hu/ok/?q=en/content/books)

adultbasicskills.wordpress.com:
For the above mentioned reason, our approach to the reduction in the number of low-skilled young and adults is quite new, however it is scientifically-based.
We made clear the scientific basis of our job for teachers:
– the reading acquisition framework
– the numeracy acquisition framework
– neuroscientific basis of reading, writing and calculating
– how to embed teaching of literacy and numeracy skills in different subjects
The result is an interactive or downloadable online magazine with tests, quizzes, links to external pages (our blog or homepage), excerpt of the articles and link to the whole documents. With this solution the readers can have access to a shortened form of the whole document and can have access to each part of it according to their priorities.

adultbasicskills.com:
Based on the scientific basis summarized in the first intellectual output, we have worked out a large set of 1.500 offline and online exercises, tools and framework of useful types of exercises, aiming at the following objectives:
– these methods and exercises can be used by teachers of any subjects
– where it is applicable different levels of a type of exercise have been elaborated
– we included templates as well as elaborated tools (cards, examples) for many exercises aiming at ease the teachers’ task in preparing for class Di We included 40 videos in the catalogue. All of them are available not only in English but in Spanish and the majority of them available in Hungarian as well.
Many exercises have been translated in Spanish and/or in Hungarian and all of them are directly available from the homepage, when the user clicks on the Spanish or Hungarian flag icon.

http://www.slke.org/campus.virtual.3.0/panel-de-control-del-campus/acceso-al-campus/29-im-possible-strategies-for-young-and-adult-learners-with-poor-basic-skills/preview.html:
The third intellectual output was a teacher training curriculum in English and in Romanian. Apart from preparing these curricula the activity was to organize a face-to-face training for Romanian teachers and an online training in English for any teachers from Europe. These teacher training curricula summarized all that we want to hand over to teachers (scientifical basis, methods, exercises, tools, guideance for being able to use these materials.) They consist in theoretical and practical parts. As some specific steps can support content teachers when they integrate literacy instruction into their everyday teaching, we implemented the next topics in our training programmes:
– Train teachers that they should have a clear and consistent message about their roles and responsibilities as they relate to literacy instruction
– Give teachers initial and ongoing professional development in vocabulary, comprehension and numeracy support
– Help teachers in adapting literacy and numeracy strategies to meet the unique needs of their content areas
– Give content teachers incentives, and appropriate tools for incorporating reading, writing and numeracy instruction.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 256904 Eur

Project Coordinator

Országos Tranzitfoglalkoztatási Egyesület & Country: HU

Project Partners

• Edirne Teknik ve Endüstri Meslek Lisesi
• CASA CORPULUI DIDACTIC TULCEA
• KLAIPEDOS VALSTYBINE KOLEGIJA
• CENTRO INTEGRADO DE FORMACIÓN PROFESIONAL MEDINA DEL CAMPO