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[Assessment 687] Fluid and Crystallized LiteracyMarie Cora marie.cora at hotspurpartners.comThu Mar 15 11:16:15 EDT 2007
Colleagues, The following post is from Tom Sticht. ******** March 13, 2007 Fluid and Crystallized Literacy: Implications for Adult Literacy Assessment and Instruction Tom Sticht International Consultant in Adult Education Psychometric research on intelligence over the last half century has resulted in a trend to draw a distinction between the knowledge aspect and the processing skills aspects of intelligence. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing up to the 1990s, the British psychologist, Raymond B. Cattell and various collaborators, and later many independent investigators, made the distinction between "fluid intelligence" and "crystallized intelligence." Cattell (1983) states, "Fluid intelligence is involved in tests that have very little cultural content, whereas crystallized intelligence loads abilities that have obviously been acquired, such as verbal and numerical ability, mechanical aptitude, social skills, and so on. The age curve of these two abilities is quite different. They both increase up to the age of about 15 or 16, and slightly thereafter, to the early 20s perhaps. But thereafter fluid intelligence steadily declines whereas crystallized intelligence stays high" (p. 23). Cognitive psychologists have re-framed the "fluid" and "crystallized" aspects of cognition into a model of a human cognitive system made-up of a long term memory which constitutes a knowledge base ("crystallized intelligence") for the person, a working memory which engages various processes ("fluid intelligence") that are going on at a given time using information picked-up from both the long term memory's knowledge base and a sensory system that picks-up information from the external world that the person is in. Today, over thirty years of research has validated the usefulness of this simple three-part model (long term memory, working memory, sensory system) as a heuristic tool for thinking about human cognition (Healy & McNamara, 1996). The model is important because it helps to develop a theory of literacy as information processing skills (reading as decoding printed to spoken language) and comprehension (using the knowledge base to create meaning) that can inform the development of new knowledge-based assessment tools and new approaches to adult education. The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), the new Adult Literacy and Lifeskills (ALL) survey, the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) of 1993 and the new 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) all used "real world" tasks to assess literacy ability cross the life span from 16 to 65 and beyond. Such test items are complex information processing tasks that engage unknown mixtures of knowledge and processes. For this reason it is not clear what they assess or what their instructional implications are (Venezky, 1992, p.4). Sticht, Hofstetter, & Hofstetter (1996) used the simple model of the human cognitive system given above to analyze performance on the NALS. It was concluded that the NALS places large demands on working memory processes ("fluid intelligence"). The decline in fluid intelligence is what may account for some of the large declines in performance by older adults on the NALS and similar tests. To test this hypothesis, an assessment of knowledge ("crystallized intelligence") was developed and used to assess adult's cultural knowledge of vocabulary, authors, magazines and famous people. The knowledge test was administered by telephone and each item was separate and required only a "yes" or "no" answer, keeping the load on working memory ("fluid intelligence") very low. Both the telephone-based knowledge test scores and NALS door-to-door survey test scores were transformed to standard scores with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The results showed clearly that younger adults did better on the NALS with its heavy emphasis on working memory processes ("fluid literacy") and older adults did better than younger adults on the knowledge base ("crystallized literacy") assessment that was given by telephone. Consistent with the foregoing theorizing and empirical demonstration, Tamassia, Lennon, Yamamoto, & Kirsch (2007) report data from a survey of the literacy skills of adults in the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) of the United States. Once again they found that performance on the literacy tasks declined with increased age, that is, the higher the age of the adults, the lower their test scores became. They state that, ".the negative relationship between age and performance is consistent with findings from previous studies of adults (i.e., IALS, ALL, and NAAL; NCES 2005; OECD and Statistics Canada 2000, 2005)." They go on to say, "Explanations of these previous findings have included (a) the effects of aging on the cognitive performance of older adults, (b) younger adults having received more recent and extended schooling, and (c) the finding that fluid intelligence may decrease with age causing older adults to have more difficulties in dealing with complex tasks (Douchemane and Fontaine 2003; OECD and Statistics Canada 2000, 2005)"(p. 107). Strucker, Yamamoto, & Kirsch (2005) assessed short term, working memory for a sample of adults who also completed Prose and Document literacy tasks from the IALS. They found a positive relationship between performance on the working memory task and the literacy tasks, showing that adults with better short term memories performed better on the IALS. Again, this is consistent with the idea that the literacy tasks involve a complex set of skills and knowledge, including the capacity to manage information well in working memory or "fluid literacy." Given the differences between younger and older adults on "fluid literacy" and "crystallized literacy" there is reason to question the validity of using "real world" tasks like those on the Prose, Document and Quantitative scales of the IALS, ALL, NALS, and NAAL to represent the literacy abilities of adults across the life span. In general, when assessing the literacy of adults, it seems wise to keep in mind the differences between short term, working memory or "fluid" aspects of literacy, such as fluency in reading with its emphasis upon efficiency of processing, and the "crystallized" or long term memory, knowledge aspects of reading. It is also important to keep in mind these differences between fluid and crystallized literacy in teaching and learning. While it is possible to teach knowledge, such as vocabulary, facts, principles, concepts, and rules (e.g., Marzano, 2004), it is not possible to directly teach fluid processing. Fluidity of information processing, such as fluency in reading, cannot be directly taught. Rather, it must be developed through extensive, guided, practice. Though I know of no research on this theoretical framework regarding the differences between fluid and crystallized literacy and instructional practices in adult literacy programs, it can be hypothesized that all learners are likely to make much faster improvements in crystallized literacy than in fluid literacy, and this should be especially true for older learners, say those over 45 to 50 years of age. References Cattell, R. (1983) Intelligence and National Achievement. Washington, DC: The Cliveden Press. Healy, A. & McNamara, D. (1996) Verbal Learning and Memory: Does the Modal Model Still Work? In J. Spence, J. Darley, & D. Foss (Eds.), Annual Review of Psychology, 47,143-172. Marzano, R. J. (2004, August). Building Background Knowledge For Academic Achievement: Research On What Works In Schools. Washington, DC: Assn. For Supervision & Curriculum. Sticht, T., Hofstetter, & Hofstetter (1996) Assessing Adult Literacy By Telephone. Journal of Literacy Research, 28, 525-559 Strucker, J., Yamamoto, K. & Kirsch, I. (2005, May). The Relationship of the Component Skills of Reading to Performance on the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). Cambridge, MA: National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy. Tamassia, C., Lennon, M., Yamamoto, K. & Kirsch, I. (2007). Adult Education in America: A First Look at Results From the Adult Education Program and Learner Surveys. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. Venezky, R. (1992, May) Matching Literacy Testing with Social Policy: What Are the Alternatives? Philadelphia, PA: National Center on Adult Literacy. Thomas G. Sticht International Consultant in Adult Education 2062 Valley View Blvd. El Cajon, CA 92019-2059 Tel/fax: 96190 444-9133 Email: tsticht at aznet.net
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