Social Benefits of Literacy Education-A Comparative Approach

I explored the relationship between community stand alone literacy programs and family literacy programs to ascertain the impact of learner participation and outcome. This study hypothesized that the family literacy program emphasizes active learning through social interaction, which promotes bonding and bridging social capital; and that participating in the family literacy programs enhances learning and learners’ achievement in standardized test scores. The study population covered 3, 700 adults and 4, 000 children who participated in the adult basic education programs in Pennsylvania, U.S. The result provided enough statistical differences in the comparative mean and standard deviations scores between the two literacy programs. Consequently, this led me to reject the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative that students who participated in the Family Literacy programs with high bonding and bridging social capital did have higher achievement scores than Community ABE/GED programs.