2.3.4 International Adult Literacy Survey IALS
The International Adult Literacy Survey Murray et al., 1998; Boudard and Jones, 2003; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD, 2009 was the
first large scale cross-country assessment of adult literacy and basic skills. It was conducted by Statistics Canada and ETS over 75,000 adults aged 16 to 65 in 22 countries
in 1994-1998. The IALS adopted the methodology, and scales of NALS which was based on proficiency levels of YALS and LSUDA. The IALS was followed by the Adult
Literacy and Life Skills Survey ALL undertaken between 2002 and 2006 by Statistics Canada and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies
PIAAC currently being developed by OECD to measure a broader range of adult skills. These three surveys are summarized in Table 7:
Table 7: Summary of IALS and its successors
Attribute IALS
ALL PIAAC
Operational definition
of literacy ―Using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve
one‘s goals and to develop one‘s knowledge and potential.‖ the same as of YALS
Similar, but with greater
emphasis on a wider variety of
text types
Date of data collection
1994 wave 1
1996 wave 2
1998 wave 3
2002 wave 1
2006 wave 2
2011 planned
Participant Canada,
Germany, France,
Ireland, The
Netherlands, Poland,
Sweden Switzerland,
French and German
speaking, USA
Australia, The
Flemish Community
in Belgium, Great
Britain, New
Zealand, Northern
Ireland Chile,
Czech Republic,
Denmark, Finland,
Hungary, Italy,
Norway, Slovenia,
Switzerland Italian
speaking Canada,
Bermuda, Italy,
Mexico Nuevo
Leon, Norway,
Switzerland, USA
Australia, Netherland,
New Zealand,
Korea, Hungary
Australia, Austria,
Belgium, Canada, Chile,
Cyprus, Czech Republic,
Denmark, Estonia,
Finland, France, Germany,
Hungary, Ireland, Italy,
Japan, Korea, Malta, the
Attribute IALS
ALL PIAAC
Netherlands, Norway,
Poland, Portugal,
Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain,
Sweden, USA, United
Kingdom
Skills assessed
20
Prose literacy Document literacy
Quantitative literacy Prose literacy
Document literacy Numeracy
Problem solving Literacy
combined prose
document Reading
components Numeracy
Problem solving in technology
rich environment
Proficiency level
Five levels as in NALS Five levels for the prose
and document literacy scales as in IALS with
slight modifications in the level descriptions; five
levels for numeracy; four levels for problem solving
Not identified yet, but
anticipated to be similar to those
of IALS and ALL
Source: OECD 2009
20
OECD definitions of each literacy skills are as follows OECD, 2009:10: Prose literacy: the knowledge and skills needed to understand and use continuous texts – information
organised in sentence and paragraph formats; Document literacy: the knowledge and skills needed to process documents, or information organized in
matrix structures i.e. in rows and columns. The type of documents covered by this domain included tables, signs, indexes, lists, coupons, schedules, charts, graphs, maps, and forms;
Quantitative literacy: the skills needed to undertake arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division either singly or in combination using numbers or quantities embedded in
printed material; Numeracy: the knowledge and skills required to effectively manage and respond to the mathematical
demands of diverse situations; Problem solving: goal-directed thinking and action in situations for which no routine solution
procedure is available; Reading components: the foundational skills needed to gain basic meaning from texts – print
vocabulary, sentence processing, and passage fluency; Problem solving in technology rich environment: the use of ‗digital technology, communication tools
and networks to acquire and evaluate information, communicate with others and perform practical tasks‘; especially using the worldwide web, spreadsheets and email.
2.3.5 National Assessment of Adult Literacy NAAL
Kategori