EDUCATION INDICATORS: An International Perspective
Indicator 10: Adult Literacy
International adult literacy
The information contained in this sidebar is taken from the Introduction and Chapter 2 of: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and Statistics Canada, Literacy, Economy, and Society: Results of the first International Adult Literacy Survey, 1995.
This indicator reports the results of a wide-ranging test of literacy skills given to a large sample of adults (ranging from 1,500 to 1,800 per country) in Europe and North America during the autumn of 1994. The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) was a collaborative effort by seven governments and three intergovernmental organizations. Each country was required to draw a probability sample from which results representative of the civilian, noninstitutionalized population aged 16_65 could be derived. In six countries, the survey was carried out in the national language; in Canada, respondents were given a choice of English or French; in Switzerland, samples drawn from French-speaking and German-speaking cantons were required to respond in those respective languages.
As literacy cannot be narrowed down to a single skill suited for dealing with all types of text, nor defined as an infinite set of skills, the IALS defined literacy in terms of three domains, each encompassing a common set of skills relevant for diverse tasks:
- Prose literacythe knowledge and skills required to understand and use information from texts including editorials, news stories, poems, and fiction;
- Document literacythe knowledge and skills required to locate and use information contained in various formats, including job applications, payroll forms, transportation schedules, maps, tables, and graphics; and
- Quantitative literacythe knowledge and skills required to apply arithmetic operations, either alone or sequentially, to numbers embedded in printed materials, such as balancing a checkbook, figuring out a tip, completing an order form, or determining from an advertisement the amount of interest on a loan.
In each of these three domains, rather than expressing a threshold for achieving literacy, a scale from 0 to 500 was constructed, upon which tasks of varying difficulty were placed. These scales were developed through the item response theory (IRT) scaling procedures. First, the difficulty of tasks was ranked on the scale according to how well respondents actually performed on them. Then, each scale was divided into five levels reflecting the empirically determined progression of information-processing skills and strategies.* Next, individuals were assigned scores between 0 and 500 according to how well they did on a variety of tasks at different levels. Finally, the percentage of readers falling into each skill level was calculated.
A person's literacy ability in each domain can be expressed by a score, defined as the point at which he or she has an 80-percent chance of successfully performing a given task. If a person's score places him or her in level 2, it means that he or she has an 80-percent chance of successfully performing level 2 tasks and a greater than 80-percent chance of performing level 1 tasks. It does not mean, however, that individuals with low proficiency can never succeed at more difficult tasks (that is, at tasks that are rated at higher skill levels). It means only that their probability of success is relatively low.
Footnotes
*/ I. Kirsh, A. Jungeblut, and P. Mosenthal, Moving toward the Measurement of Adult Literacy (Washington, D.C.) U.S. Department of Labor, forthcoming.
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