Urban Adult Literacy Education: Using Concept Mapping to Reach Young Students of Color

While the high school dropout rate has shown steady improvement during the last decade, it is still unacceptably high among students of color. They make up a large percentage of the 3.3 million youths who have not completed H.S.; however, they are the least likely to take, complete, and pass GED tests. Concept mapping could offer for young urban adult learners the opportunity to make meaningful, fully integrated, and supervised connections between their lived experiences and the knowledge explored in literacy classes. This paper explores the potential use of concept maps as an instructional intervention in adult literacy programs.