Adult Literacy Development and Changes in Cognitive Processes

• In Event: Adult Education Research Around the Globe

Abstract

As individuals develop literacy skills, they not only acquire more information, but their higher cognitive processes get modified as well. Although concrete and familiar materials are handled easily by individuals with low levels of literacy, abstract, symbolic manipulations seem to develop and improve as a function of formal education. Two groups of adults (40 university students and 47 individuals with no known impairments who were attending adult literacy classes for beginning readers of Turkish) completed verbal fluency, phonological processing and memory tasks. The university students performed significantly better on almost all tasks. These results imply that formal education is important not only for reading and writing skills but also for improving certain cognitive processes.

Authors

• Aydin Durgunoglu, University of Minnesota - Duluth

• Burcu Sasmaz, Bogazici University

• Karel Bensusan, Bogazici University

• Mustafa Kaya, Bogazici University

• Fatih Ustun, Bogazici University

• Sezin Matkap, Bogazici University