The new school year can be an exciting time for many adult learners entering the classroom and a fresh start for others continuing their GED journey. Every fall there is much abuzz about students returning to school with much of the focus on traditional K-12 and college students, but those of us in the adult education community know it’s an equally important time for GED students.

This time can also be intimidating for adults who left school many years ago and want to re-enter a classroom setting. For many programs this means meeting students “where they are” and engaging them in a way that eliminates some of the intimidation with school enrollment. This is a great time for programs to hold back-to-school night and attend community events where instructors and coordinators can meet face-to-face with prospective students.

Sharing student success stories is a powerful way to connect with adult learners. Highlighting graduates of your program through local, print and broadcast media adds a personal connection to the hard work and perseverance of GED students. This works well in conjunction with advertising your class offerings and schedule in local print and broadcast media. Social media is also a powerful advertising tool for showcasing your classes, sharing these graduate success stories and actively engaging with interested and current students.

This presentation from our annual conference reviews successful marketing campaigns GED Testing Service has done and provides tips on how local adult education programs can apply our findings to help with student recruitment. Some of these strategies include:

• Use GED Analytics and data to identify your demographics and identify the best ways to reach your target student population
  • Younger students may be more likely to seek information via social media, older students via traditional media
• Utilize paid, earned and owned media to increase the visibility of your program
  • Paid – print, tv, radio and direct mail
  • Earned – press mentions, reviews and social media mentions from others
  • Owned – program website, recruitment events and social posts from program accounts
• Set objectives, develop appropriate messaging and determine how you will evaluate success
  • Recognize challenges and opportunities unique to your program
  • Determine what metrics define success for your program

GED Testing Service has also created posters in English and Spanish that can be displayed at your adult education program and/or test center to promote the GED test.

If you have other ideas for promoting adult education classes and recruiting GED students we encourage you to share them in our Facebook forum for adult educators.

In “Changes You’ve Been Asking for: The RLA Test Screen & Score Reports,” our professional development and assessment teams discussed the format changes in the RLA test that students will see in 2019.

Over the last few years many educators and students have given us a great deal of feedback related to the RLA test interface and suggested changes. In the webinar we reviewed the following upcoming changes to the test:

• The response box will be greatly enlarged on the right-hand side of the display. Students will be able to view, write and edit their response more easily.
  
• The instructions will be reformatted and made clearer on the left-hand side of the display. The instructions have not changed, but the information that is accessed by clicking on the “ER Answer Guidelines” will now be more accessible as part of the instructions.
• The instructions will appear with selected words in bold type. When a student reads only these bolded words, they can still understand the task.
  
• These enhanced instructions will also appear on all accommodated tests, GED Ready® and Spanish tests.
• The reading material which is currently presented across multiple tabs will be presented in one tab that students scroll through. There will now be just two tabs on the left-hand side of the display: one tab for the revised instructions, and a second tab for the reading material.

The webinar also presented ongoing research that will improve the usability and effectiveness of the GED score reports based on a two-phase research study we launched in 2017. In the first phase we looked at how educators and students understand and use the score report and we used these findings to build prototypes. In 2019 we will research if these prototypes work for both educators and students. After a number of reviews we will conclude with the last usability study.

Here are a few examples of our findings from the research:

• Revise language to make the reports easier to understand including:
  • Skills/indicators in “How to Score Higher”
  • Information provided in “What Does My Score Mean”
    

• Update the study plan including:
  • Sorting the study plan by page numbers in the book
  • Printable version with margins that allow for hand-written notes

The full presentation and a downloadable pdf are available here.

This year we debuted a professional development track that addresses the specific needs of educators teaching and administering the GED test in correctional facilities.The sessions and workshops featured in the corrections track were created based on feedback and ongoing work GED Testing Service is doing to meet the needs of corrections educators and students.

Much of the feedback we’re receiving comes directly from the GED Corrections forum group. This panel consists of GED test administrators and educators that have monthly calls with GED Testing Service. During the calls our leadership, assessment and test operations teams, as well as state relationship managers, have the opportunity to get insight from those working in corrections. Participants share information about the challenges they face in the classroom and provide recommendations related to instructional resources and GED test administration.

This increased focus on corrections testing and professional development aligns directly with the improved outcomes we’re seeing across the GED test program and specifically with testers in corrections.

The GED credential is receiving more attention in this space as more national conversations are had about the positive impact education and workforce training has in reducing recidivism among offenders. We encourage you to share student success stories related to the GED and corrections as part of our ongoing effort to showcase the diversity of GED graduates and the life-changing impact of the credential.

In future InSession newsletters we will continue to share updates about corrections testing including national testing numbers.

The GEDWorks program is growing and giving more working students the opportunity to earn their GED diploma at no-cost.The program has grown to reflect a wide variety of employers spanning the US, including our two latest partners, The Cheesecake Factory and Total Wine & More.

This past June The Cheesecake Factory began offering the GEDWorks program to kitchen staff working in all of their 200 restaurants nationwide, including Rock Sugar Southeast Asian Kitchen and Grand Lux Cafe. As the eighth largest restaurant company in the US, this added benefit will help a large population of workers and has already proven promising with Cheesecake Factory celebrating its first GEDWorks graduate within a month of the program’s launch.

Total Wine & More, the country’s largest independent retailer of fine wine, will soon begin offering the GEDWorks program to its employees. The corporate-owned franchise operates 186 stores across 23 states and employs over 4,000 people.

Since the launch of the GEDWorks program in 2015 over 3,000 students have earned their GED credential with the support of their employer. To date we have 13 companies spanning the restaurant, publishing, retail and hotel industries offering the GEDWorks program with several others, including Brinker International (Chili’s and Maggiano’s) and the American Hotel and Lodging Educational Association, offering a GED diploma pathway through Pearson.

We expect additional companies to join the ranks and offer the GEDWorks program, or similar GED education benefits, as more employers make the commitment to helping their workers pursue their professional, academic and personal goals.

More information about the GEDWorks program is available here and additional details about The Cheesecake Factory and Total Wine & More launches will be made public in the near future.