Wagner, Daniel A
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Publication New Technologies for Adult Literacy and International Development(2009-01-01) Wagner, Daniel AFew areas of social and economic development have received as much attention and as few proportionate resources as adult literacy. Across the world – in both industrialized and developing countries alike – it is widely acknowledged that at most, 5 percent of national education budgets is spent on the roughly 50 percent of the adult population in need of increased literacy skills. For several centuries, it has been variously claimed that literacy – a key (if not the key) product of schooling – would lead to economic growth, social stability, a democratic way of life, and other social 'good things.' Detailed historical reviews have not been so kind to such generalizations (see several chapters in Wagner, Venezky & Street, 1999; also UNESCO, 2005), in that literacy 'campaigns,' in particular, were often more politically inspired than practically implemented (Wagner, 1986). General notions of national economic growth have been said to have a similar set of positive consequences for the poor. However, both universal literacy and universal economic growth have suffered from what has been called at times 'development fatigue' – namely, that governments and international agencies have come to feel that significant toil and funding have led to only limited return on investment.Publication On Being an Adolescent in Zawiya. Review of Susan S. Davis and Douglas A. Davis, Adolescence in a Moroccan Towan: Making Social Sense(1991) Wagner, Daniel A; Puchner, Laurel DianaAlthough adolescence is a well-accepted stage of life in Western society, the issue of whether it exists as a separate life stage in all cultures remains an open and important question. As part of the cross-cultural Harvard Adolescence Project directed by Beatrice and John Whiting, this book is an assessment of traditional concepts of adolescence in Morocco. Based on 11 months of intensive fieldwork, as well as multiple years of work in the same village, the authors used ethnographic observation, interviews, and psychological testing to collect a wide array of data on about 50 families including 150 children in the rural Moroccan town of Zawiya. Recurring themes in the lives of these adolescents, including maturity, self-awareness, gender, hierarchy, and ambivalence, are interwoven into a discussion of the basic social organization of Moroccan life.Publication Review of R.V. Kail, Jr. and J.W. Hagen (Eds.), Perspectives on the Development of Memory and Cognition, and D.G. Bobrow and A. Collins (Eds.), Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science(1978) Wagner, Daniel AThe use of narrative and other prose forms as a tool for investigating mental processes is not new. Psychologists such as Jean Piaget and F.C. Bartlett both used stories in research on complex cognitive skills in children and adults. However, with the advent of Ebbinghaus' monumental work on memory using "non-sense syllables," theoretical psychology turned away from the use of meaningful material. With the use of nonsense syllables, researchers hoped to isolate the variables of memory and individual content associations. Recently, there has been a renewal of interest in the study of narrative and memory due to the recognition that narrative taps certain processes that syllables and isolated words do not. In addition, narrative and memory studies have generated interest among those researchers concerned with the applicability of memory studies to educational settings.Publication Quality, Learning, and Cultural Comparisons: Trade-Offs in Educational Policy Development(2014-01-01) Wagner, Daniel AWith the advent of the United Nations Education First initiative, and considering the continued efforts to focus on the quality of education in low-income countries, there has been a renewed interest in the improvement of learning (as distinct from school attendance) in poor and marginalized populations (Wagner, Murphy, and de Korne, 2012).1 There is a large and diverse empirical research base in the area of human learning. Yet much of the available research is substantially limited by boundary constraints of various kinds. Most prominent among them is the limited ability to generalize from findings in one population context to other distinct population contexts. Similarly, research methods may vary greatly between one set of studies and another, making it difficult to discern whether the findings vary due to the methods or to other factors. These are classic problems in the social sciences, and inevitably lead to substantive trade-offs in how policy development takes place in education.Publication New Days for Old Ways: Islamic Education in a Changing World(1983) Wagner, Daniel AIn 1981, Prof. Daniel A. Wagner of the University of Pennsylvania (U.S.A.) and Prof. Abdelhamid Lotfi of Mohamed V University (Morocco) undertook a comparative study of traditional Islamic education in five countries of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Social Science Research Council, and IDRC, the study aimed to provide descriptive and analytical perspectives on Quranic schools. The following article is primarily extracted from two papers prepared by Dr. Wagner as a result of the study.Publication How Much is Learning Measurement Worth? Assessment Costs in Low-Income Countries(2011-01-01) Wagner, Daniel A; Babson, Andrew; Murphy, Katie MTimely and credible data on student learning has become a global issue in the ongoing effort to improve educational outcomes. With the potential to serve as a powerful diagnostic tool to gauge the overall health and well-being of an educational system, educational assessments have received increasing attention among specialists and the media. Though the stakes are high, relatively little is known about the cost-benefit ratio of various assessments compared to other educational expenditures. This paper presents an overview of four major types of assessments — national, regional, international and hybrid — and the costs that each has incurred within 13 distinct contexts, especially in low-income countries. The findings highlight broad variation in the total cost of assessment and the cost-per-learner. This underscores the importance of implementation strategies that appropriately consider scale, timeliness, and cost-efficiency as critical considerations for any assessment.Publication Literacy and Adult Education: Thematic Studies(2000-04-01) Wagner, Daniel AThe 1990 World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) in Jomtien, Thailand, included adult literacy as one of its six major worldwide goals. Although the complete elimination of illiteracy by the year 2000 was adopted as a goal of UNESCO and a significant number of its Member States in the Udaipur Declaration of two decades ago, the Jomtien Conference scaled back such promises, and chose a more modest, and theoretically achievable, goal of cutting illiteracy rates in half by the year 2000. The reasons for this reduction in targeted goal were numerous. As this report describes, important gains have been made in literacy and adult education over the decade since Jomtien – in various places and using various methods – but the overall literacy situation remains one of the major concerns of the twenty-first century.Publication Reading Acquisition in Morocco(1986) Wagner, Daniel A; Spratt, Jennifer EWhile interest in reading and writing has always been important to researchers and educational policy-makers, multidisciplinary investigations of the acquisition of literacy are a relatively new enterprise. In the Arabic-speaking wrold, in particular, there have been relatively few efforts to discover what kinds of literacy abilities the child brings to the classroom, and what kinds of home, preschool, and language environments lead to various levels of literacy both in and out of school. The research described here presents data collected during the first three years of the Morocco Literacy Project, whose general aim has been to investigate the process of literacy acquisition and retention in Morocco. The present paper will consider the effects of preschool experience and language background on a sample of primary school children living in contrastin rural and urban environments in Morocco.Publication To Read or Not to Read: The Enduring Question of Low Adult Literacy in America(1995-10-25) Wagner, Daniel AIn 1990, America's governors reached a historic consensus on a set of national educational goals as targets for the year 2000. Among these national goals was that " ... every adult American shall be literate." While this goal was widely applauded by those in the literacy community, much more national attention (and nearly 15 times the budgetary resources) has been devoted to the other goals that focus almost exclusively on improving the formal K-12 school system. Now, with the new Adult Education Act, welfare-reform legislation pending in Congress, and renewed debate over the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, the troubling (and enduring) question of low-literate Americans is back in the news.Publication Review of S.A. Ashraf, New Horizons in Muslim Education(1987-02-01) Wagner, Daniel ABetween 1977 and 1982, a series of four world conferences on Muslim education were held in various Muslim countries that all dealt with aspects of how contemporary Muslims can maintain Islamic values in the modern educational world. Ashraf was one of the principal organizers of these conferences and contributed a key-note address for each one. The present small volume is a collection of these papers, which range from the general nature of the Islamic education to the development of curricula, new textbooks, and new teaching methods.