National Assessment of Adult Literacy NAAL

2.3.5 National Assessment of Adult Literacy NAAL

The National Assessment of Adult literacy NAAL National Research Council, 2005 is a successor to NALS, conducted in 2003 by the U.S. Department of Education. NAAL was designed to measure functional English literacy skills, including health literacy, of about 19,000 U.S. adults aged 16 and older in households and prisons Baer et al., 2009:iii. It retained substantial consistency with the 1992 NALS and evaluated trends over the ensuing decade. Four assessment components of the NAAL project consist of the core literacy tasks, the main literacy assessment, the Adult Literacy Supplemental Assessment ALSA 21 , and the Fluency Addition to NAAL FAN 22 . Seven simple literacy questions, called the core literacy tasks, were first given to all respondents. The respondents unable to answer the core literacy tasks successfully were assigned to the ALSA and all other respondents to the main literacy assessment. On scales of 0 to 500, the main literacy assessment measured the three types of literacy – prose, document, and quantitative literacy ibid.:iv. Results from the 2003 NAAL were reported as average and as the percentage of America ‘s adults using five performance levels for each of the three types of English literacy. A brief description of each level is 21 The Adult Literacy Supplemental Assessment ALSA was designed to gather information about certain skills of America ‘s adults with lowest literacy. The respondents in the ALSA were asked to complete a series of basic skills – letter and word-reading, word identification, and basic comprehension skills – using products with English text commonly found at home, at work, and in the community Baer et al., 2009:3. 22 The FAN was administered to all adults who participated in the NAAL project following the completion of the main literacy assessment or the supplemental assessment. The FAN was an oral reading fluency assessment developed to measure the basic reading skills of America ‘s adults. All the respondents taken the FAN were asked to read aloud a series of short text passages and digit, letter, and word lists. Their oral reading of each task on the assessment were recorded and scored later for speed and accuracy ibid.:4. presented in section 2.6. As shown in Table 7, all the national and international direct assessment were designed and conducted for the populations of developed countries. Wagner 2008:659 remarks that such sophisticated measurement raises several issues: ―the low degree of transparency of the data when collected using the IRT 23 methodology, the expensive process of creating methods of cross-cultural comparability, the long time taken to complete a given study, and the overall cost of highly sophisticated methods in poor countries. ‖

2.3.6 Literacy Assessment and Monitoring Program LAMP