Emotions played a powerful part in the choice of learning strategies for participants in the study. For many, their comfort level with a learning strategy was more important than the efficacy of the strategy. While this may also be true of many people with more formal education, it powerfully restricted the ability to learn of participants who had little agency, and a limited social circle. The most frequent strategy our participants used was " Ask Someone." They were reluctant to ask someone if they feared the person would be sarcastic or unfriendly. Participants with higher agency, however, had developed the selfconfidence to approach a wider range of people.

All our participants are adults with little formal education. As you read their learning stories and had glimpses into their lives, you saw what a diverse group they represent. Some are very skilled and have paid employment. Others are struggling to get the skills they need to get any kind of job. Still others have “given up" the struggle. But they all have developed strategies to learn. Some rely on strategies from childhood. Many carry emotional baggage related to learning. Most value formal education. They want their children to graduate. They would like to upgrade their own skills and they feel life would be easier with a diploma.

As we worked on this research, we reflected on what it would mean to practitioners, agencies and businesses that work and provide service to this diverse group of adults and to politicians, policy makers and the communities in which we all live. The following section provides our recommendations. We hope you will have many to add.

Recommendations

For literacy and adult basic programs

We were aware, as we were interviewing participants, of how similar they were to students who were in our programs. Hence, although the research participants were not in programs, we think that our findings have implications for adults with little formal education who come back to school to up-grade their skills.

• Use a friendly person, rather than print or recorded messages or on-line sites, to recruit students, since participants’ most frequent learning strategy was “ask someone.” Front-line staff should be trained in strategies to make adults with little formal education feel safe and comfortable.
• Acknowledge students’ “baggage” from prior learning, which affects their learning as adults, and help students reflect on it and use that reflection to develop a sense of their own strengths and to improve their ability to learn.
• Foster and recognize non-academic outcomes of attending in a program, outcomes that build self-esteem, encourage awareness of and reflection on life and learning experiences and increase agency. Since people with higher agency develop more varied and more useful learning strategies, working with learners on increasing agency and self worth is a useful strategy for improving learning strategies.