One area for improvement that could lead to higher levels of adult literacy, in evolution as well as other subjects, is student testing.
How many professors reading paleonet assess their students' progress with exams that force students to formulate a cogent and coherent response and then express that response in an intelligible, organized, and grammatically correct manner?
Alternatively, how many professors hand out multiple-choice exams that can be processed through a scantron machine?
While at Amherst College in the mid-1970s, I don't recall having taken a single multiple choice test. I've seen some college exams since that would be a professional embarrassment for a middle school teacher. In my own high school classes, I haven't ever given a multiple-choice, true-false, fill-in-the-blank, match-the-items test.
As for the teaching of evolution (or any subject with an important conceptual component): students who are required to communicate their own understanding of the subject, and who receive feedback from an instructor if their understanding is deficient, are more likely to walk away with the skills advocated by adult literacy proponents than students who are told simply that answer 'a,' 'b,' or 'c' is correct.
The moral of the story: if you want to have higher levels of performance, you must have higher levels of expectation. Students can only while away their time with Facebook or other distractions if there are no academic consequences. If students are only assigned 50 pages to read a week, and correctly conclude that reading half that will yield a good grade, is the diminished learning the student's fault, or the professor's?
Tom DeVries