Analyzing Tools

The U.S. PIAAC Skills Map is an interactive data tool that allows users to access state- and county-level data on the literacy and numeracy proficiency of adults ages 16–74 in all 50 states, all 3,141 counties, and the District of Columbia. The Skills Map also includes state- and county-level model-based estimates for six age groups and four education groups.

The IDB Analyzer is a free Windows-based software tool developed by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) that can be used to combine and analyze data from large-scale education studies such as PIAAC, PISA, TIMSS, and NAEP. The IDB Analyzer creates SAS code or SPSS syntax that takes into account information from the sampling design in the computation of sampling variance and that also handles plausible values.

These tutorial videos present an overview of the U.S. PIAAC Skills Map—an online tool providing data on the literacy and numeracy skills of adults in all states and counties. The first video shows how to use and navigate the map, how to interpret the county/state summary cards, the functions of the comparison tool, how to utilize demographic variables, and much more. The second video is more specific and shows how to interpret results of the map, including data for age and education subgroups.

EdSurvey is an R statistical package that is tailored to the processing and analysis of NCES large-scale education data and that takes into account the assessment’s complex sample survey design and use of plausible values. Key functions of EdSurvey include data processing and manipulation, cross tabulation, analysis of achievement levels and benchmarks, percentiles, correlations, linear regression, logistic regression, and gap analysis. EdSurvey was developed by AIR and commissioned by NCES.