A primary goal of publicly funded adult education programs in the United States is to help adults increase their reading skills so their educational, vocational, and personal goals are more attainable. Adult education teachers are challenged with providing effective reading instruction for a diverse group of adults who have widely varying reading goals, skill levels, and learning difficulties. Are adult educators adequately prepared to meet this challenge? Adult basic education practitioners may have had little direct training in reading instruction and none in how to address the learning needs of adults, yet the improvement of reading instruction increasingly is being emphasized at the national level. This study determines actual and perceived teaching-of-reading knowledge of adult educators as a function of experience and training. The authors examine the level of knowledge that adult education teachers possess and the level of knowledge teachers say they have. Knowledge that teachers think they have, or metacognitive knowledge, is important as a basis for instructional planning, and, because of its relationship to motivation, teachers who believe they know a great deal about teaching reading are not likely to invest time and energy into learning more. This study focuses primarily on determining teachers' knowledge in the four areas highlighted in the Reading Research Working Group (RRWG) reports: (1) alphabetics; (2) fluency, comprising basic reading skills; (3) vocabulary; and (4) comprehension, comprising advanced reading skills. Specific questions that guided the study were: (1) How knowledgeable are adult basic educators about evidence-based reading instruction?; and (2) What is the relationship between the knowledge that adult basic educators say they have and the knowledge they demonstrate based on the results of an objective assessment? (Contains 9 tables.)