Educational Psychology Is Evolving to Accommodate Technology, Multiple Disciplines, and Twenty-First-Century Skills.

This article covers recent research activities in educational psychology that have an interdisciplinary emphasis and that accommodate twenty-first-century skills in addition to the traditional foundations of literacy, numeracy, science, reasoning (problem-solving), and academic subject matter. We emphasize digital technologies because they are capable of tracking learning data in rich detail and reliably delivering interventions that are tailored to individual learners in particular sociocultural contexts. This is a departure from inflexible pedagogical approaches that previously have been routinely adopted in most classrooms and other contexts of instruction with no precise record of learning and instructional activities. A good design of educational technology embraces the principles of learning science, identifies the basic types of learning that are needed, implements relevant technological affordances, and accommodates feedback from different stakeholders. This article covers research in literacy, collaborative problem-solving, motivation, emotion, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas.

Relative Effectiveness of Reading Intervention Programs for Adults with Low Literacy.

To compare the efficacy of instructional programs for adult learners with basic reading skills below the seventh grade level, 300 adults were randomly assigned to one of three supplementary tutoring programs designed to strengthen decoding and fluency skills, and gains were examined for the 148 adult students who completed the program. The three intervention programs were based on or adapted from instructional programs that have been shown to benefit children with reading levels similar to those of the adult sample. Each program varied in its relative emphasis on basic decoding versus reading fluency instruction. A repeated measures MANOVA confirmed small to moderate reading gains from pre- to post-testing across a battery of targeted reading measures, but no significant relative differences across interventions. An additional 152 participants who failed to complete the intervention differed initially from those who persisted. Implications for future research and adult literacy instruction are discussed.

Relationships among reading skills of adults with low literacy.

In this study, confirmatory factor analyses were used to examine the interrelationships among latent factors of the simple view model of reading comprehension (word recognition and language comprehension) and hypothesized additional factors (vocabulary and reading fluency) in a sample of 476 adult learners with low literacy levels. The results provided evidence for reliable distinctions between word recognition, fluency, language comprehension, and vocabulary skills as components of reading. Even so, the data did not support the hypothesis that the simple view needs to be expanded to include vocabulary or fluency factors, as has been posited in a few prior studies of younger and more able readers. Rather, word recognition and language comprehension alone were found to account adequately for variation in reading comprehension in adults with low literacy.