Technology Integration

The ASAP initiative focuses on discovering and documenting assessment needs in adult education and workforce development and responding to those needs through the creation of online banks of literacy and numeracy tasks. These assessments are intended to serve adult learners, educators, employers, and researchers. Rather than functioning as a traditional academic study, ASAP is primarily a product development effort informed by a series of user experience (UX) studies. The development process has been grounded in extensive practitioner input, beginning with a…

The ASAP initiative is focused on identifying and responding to assessment needs in adult education and workforce development through the creation of online banks of literacy and numeracy tasks. Designed to support adult learners, educators, employers, and researchers, ASAP is primarily a product development effort informed by a series of user experience (UX) studies. These studies have involved adult education practitioners and learners across the United States, with needs assessment data collected in Alabama, Arkansas, Massachusetts, and New York.…

Adult Numeracy in the Digital Era (ANDE) is a technology-enhanced, standards-aligned numeracy course designed to meet the needs of adult learners and their instructors. The project was structured in four phases: development, feasibility testing, impact study, and dissemination, and aimed to produce a flexible, research-informed curriculum grounded in the College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS Levels C and D). The intervention design combined instructional modules with professional development supports that emphasized classroom community, mathematics…

The ASAP initiative was launched to address a persistent gap in adult education and workforce development: the lack of flexible, meaningful assessment tools that reflect the real skills adult learners use in educational, workplace, and everyday contexts. ASAP aims to discover and document assessment needs across adult education and workforce systems and to meet those needs by developing online banks of literacy and numeracy tasks. Rather than approaching this work as a traditional academic study, ASAP has functioned primarily as a product development effort…

SkillBlox is a free application designed to help teachers locate, organize, and share open educational resources (OER) within collections called “Blox.” These collections can then be shared with learners or other teachers, offering flexible ways to supplement instruction. Based on lessons from prior studies of Teaching Skills That Matter (TSTM) implementation, the TSTM-SkillBlox project sought to improve the platform’s usability, curate high-quality OER, and test whether teachers could effectively use SkillBlox to align their instruction with TSTM’s skills and…

The AutoTutor for Adult Reading Comprehension (ARC) project is developing and testing an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) designed to improve reading comprehension for adults with limited literacy skills. The approach uses collaborative “trialogues” among a teacher agent, a peer student agent, and the adult learner to model effective comprehension strategies. Initial research took place in classrooms, but the project’s long-term goal was to make the tool accessible inside and outside of classrooms, with or without a supporting curriculum. In 2023, this work…

Help shape the future of assessments for adults.As part of the IES-funded Adult Skills Assessment Program (ASAP), the University of Massachusetts Amherst is piloting short math and reading assessments for adult learners. Currently, learners can take:The ASAP Math Pilot Placement AssessmentASAP Math Assessments associated with selected CALM unitsASAP Reading Assessments associated with SkillBloxASAP Math assessments for students interested in semiconductor training programsASAP assessments for workers in the strawberry harvesting industryWe are inviting…

The Teaching Skills That Matter–SkillBlox (TSTM-SkillBlox) instructional support pilot was designed to help adult education teachers integrate instruction aligned with the TSTM framework, a U.S. Department of Education initiative supporting learners’ academic and employment goals. At the center of the pilot was SkillBlox, an emerging digital application that enables teachers to find, organize, and share open educational resources aligned to TSTM skills and topics. Teachers also received professional development webinars and ongoing support to apply TSTM…