<blockquote>The NALS literacy definition and scales seem to have been widely misunderstood by lay audiences. One bit of evidence on the depth of popular misunderstanding of the NALS can be found in _Education Week_'s September 15, 1993 story on the release of the NALS report. Under the headline "Half of adults lack skills, literacy study finds," the first sentence of the story is as follows:
Nearly half of all adult Americans cannot read, write, and calculate well enough to function fully in today's society, and people in their early 20's have poorer literacy skills than did those in a 1985 survey, according to a federal study.
This summary statement of the NALS findings contains several rather serious and probably common misconceptions. First, the statement that half of all adult American lack adequate writing skills is an apparent misunderstanding of the nature of the NALS document literacy measures. Second, the association of performance at NALS Levels 1 and 2 with functional illiteracy is never made in the NALS report. In fact, this association is directly contradicted by a bulleted point in the report's Executive Summary (Kirsch, et al. 1993) that reads (in part):
The approximately 90 million adults who performed in Levels 1 and 2 did not necessarily perceive themselves as being 'at risk.' Š It is therefore possible that their skills, while limited, allow them to meet some or most of their personal and occupational literacy needs (xv).
Third, the NALS report attributes its finding of relatively lower performance by adults in their 20s to changing demographics and particularly to "the dramatic increase in the percentages of young Hispanic adults, many of whom were born in other countries and are learning English as a second language" (xvi). It is certainly not fair to judge the quality of public (mis)understanding of the NALS report by one newspaper article. (Regie Stites, "'How Much Literacy is Enough?' Issues in Defining and Reporting Performance Standards for the National Assessment of Adult Literacy," National Center for Education Statistics Working Paper No. 2000-07, <http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2000/200007.pdf>, March 2000 p. 23)</blockquote>
Doug wrote:
>And looking at some of the samples isn't very comforting either;
>"level 2" prose literacy requires a reader to locate a basic fact
>in a simple newspaper article, a skill that was beyond 21% of the
>population. "Level 4" requires people to paraphrase a simple op-ed
>article - only 20% of the pop could do that.
Apparently, the _Education Week_ reporter lacked skills to perform "Level 4" prose literacy tasks, which "require the reader to search text and match on multiple features, integrate or synthesize multiple pieces of information, or generate new information by combining the information provided with common knowledge, when the passages are complex or lengthy" (<http://nces.ed.gov/naal/resources/92results.asp#prose>).
Take a look at international comparisons employing the same Levels 1-5 classificatory scheme to evaluate prose, document, and quantitative literacy levels: Marilyn Binkley, Nancy Matheson, and Trevor Williams, "Adult Literacy: An International Perspective" (Working Paper No. 97-33, <http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=9733>, October 1997); and "Literacy in the Information Age: Final Report of the International Adult Literacy Survey" (<http://www.oecd.org/publications/e-book/8100051e.pdf>, 2000). As far as mean scores are concerned, Americans are in the middle, about the same as the British.
As for Levels 4-5, very few countries have more than 20% of their populations at Level 4 or above: only Canada (22.7%), Sweden (32.4%), the United States (21.1%), and Finland (22.4%) on the prose scale; Canada (25.1%), the Netherlands (20.0%), Sweden (35.5%), Denmark (25.4%), Finland (25.1%), and Norway (29.4%) on the document scale; Canada (22.2%), Germany (23.5%), Sweden (35.8%), Switzerland/French (20.4%), the United States (22.5%), Belgium (22.6%), Czech Republic (31.9%), Denmark (28.4%), Norway (27.4%) and on the quantitative scale. See "Table 2.2: Percent of Population Aged 16-65 at Each Prose, Document, and Quantitative Literacy Level, 1994-1998" ("Literacy in the Information Age," <http://www.oecd.org/publications/e-book/8100051e.pdf>, pp. 136-137) for detailed information.
What makes the United States different from countries whose mean scores are close to its scores is that there exists a large inequality between the most and least literate in the United States: "in Denmark, the range of scores from the 5th to the 95th percentile on the prose scale is around 120 points. . . . In Portugal and the United States, the other extremes, the range of the prose scale for the same two percentiles is around 231 points" ("Literacy in the Information Age," <http://www.oecd.org/publications/e-book/8100051e.pdf>, p. 13). See "Figure 2.1: Distribution of Literacy Scores" ("Literacy in the Information Age," <http://www.oecd.org/publications/e-book/8100051e.pdf>, p. 14).
BTW, this type of technocratic survey of functional literacy is almost invariably accompanied with an assumption that "[t]he fall in real wages of people with low skills and widening earning differentials since the 1980s are also evidence of upskilling in Canada, the European Union and the United States (OECD 1996b)" ("Literacy in the Information Age," <http://www.oecd.org/publications/e-book/8100051e.pdf>, p. 8). That's the sort of bullshit that only those who function at neoclassical economics literacy Levels 4-5 would buy. An example of a prose literacy test included on page 19 of "Adult Literacy: An International Perspective" (Working Paper No. 97-33, <http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=9733>, October 1997) betrays ideology that underwrites it:
<blockquote>Exhibit 1.5 An example -- Level 5 prose literacy
The reader is to look at an announcement from a personnel department and list two ways in which CIEM helps people who will lose their jobs because of departmental reorganization.
[A Picture of the Centre on Internal and External Mobility Announcement]</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>