[Reading-hall-of-fame] Are We Losing Our Highly Literate?

[tsticht at znet.com]

August 23, 2005

Un-Learning Literacy in Canada and the United States:
Evidence from the ALL Survey

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

In the fall of 2005 the United State’s National Center for Education
Statistics (NCES) is scheduled to release the results of the National
Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). The data for this assessment were
obtained in 2003.

While the NAAL results will be reported this fall, another new report on
adult literacy jointly produced by Statistics Canada and the Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was released earlier in
2005. It presents data from the international Adult Literacy and Life
Skills (ALL) survey of 2003. (see: Statistics Canada (2005). Learning a
Living: First Results of the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey.
Available online at www.statcan.ca)

Changes in skills profiles from IALS to ALL

On page 39 of the ALL report it discusses changes in skills profiles from
the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) of 1994 to the ALL survey of
2003 for Canada, the United States and a few other countries. Here I will
focus on just Canada and the US. According to the ALL report, "The ALL and
the IALS assessed prose and document literacy skills using identical
methods and metrics. This was done so as to permit comparable and reliable
estimates of changes in skill profiles between the two survey periods. "

In the IALS and ALL, adults 16 to 65 years of age were assessed using "real
world" tasks like newspaper articles, transportation schedules, and the
like. The adults’ literacy on prose and document scales were divided into
five levels: Level 1 being the lowest level of literacy, then Level 2,
Level 3, and the two top levels, 4 and 5. In reporting data, Levels 4 and 5
are combined in both the IALS and ALL.

Of most concern to adult literacy educators have been the data for the
percentages of adults in literacy Level 1, the level of the least literate
adults. In the present analyses, I have combined the data for prose and
document literacy and present the average figures for these two literacy
scales. In Canada, in 1994 there were 17.3 percent of adults in Level 1 of
the combined prose and document scales, while in 2003 this declined to
15.1, a drop of 2.2 percent in the percentage of adults in the lowest level
of literacy in Canada.

In the United States, there were 22.2 percent in Level 1 in 1994, and this
dropped to 20.1 in 2003, for a decrease of the least literate of 2.1
percentage points. From these data, one might conclude that adults in
Canada and the United States became more literate from 1994 to 2003, and
that perhaps this was due to the efforts of adult literacy educators who
received increases in funding during this period.

However, this position is questioned by another set of findings presented in
the ALL report. In this case the findings concern the highest levels of
literacy, Levels 4/5. In Canada, it was found that the percentage of adults
in Levels 4/5 of the combined prose and document scales dropped from 24
percent in 1994 to 20 percent in 2003, a reduction of -4 percentage points
in the most capable adults. Stated otherwise, from 1994 to 2003 there was a
 decrease of 4/24=16.6 percent, indicating a loss of one in six of the most
literate adults in Canada.

In the United States, the percentage of Level 4/5 adults fell from 20.9
percent on the combined prose and document scales to 13.9 percent, a drop
of – 7 percent. This is a reduction of 7/20.9= 33.3 percent, a loss of one
in three of the most literate adults in the United States.

So in Canada and the United States, the gain in adult literacy at the lowest
levels is more than offset by the loss of literacy at the highest levels.
The ALL report comments on these changes and states, "
 improvements in
performance at the lower end and reductions at the upper ends of
distributions imply less inequality in the distribution of prose and
document skills."  This raises the question of whether reductions in
"inequality" in literacy abilities of adults is a worthy goal for social
policy even if it is achieved by reducing the numbers of adults with high
level skills. I think not.

Social Policies for Learning and Un-Learning Literacy

Why have Canada and the United States (and some of the other nations in the
ALL study) lost so many of their high level literates from the 1994 IALS to
the 2003 ALL? And what does this imply for policy and practice regarding
adult literacy education? There is no explanation and little discussion
offered in the ALL report, though the authors do conclude that, "The
results point to significant skill loss in several countries. Given the
high costs and returns accruing to skill development, the top priority for
further work is to study the determinants of skill gain and loss (p. 271)."

This fall the first reports of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy
(NAAL) in the United States are scheduled to be released. It will be of
interest to compare the findings of the NAAL with those of the ALL to see
how they agree or disagree in their representations of  the literacy skills
of adults in the United States.  As things stand now, based on the ALL
report, both the United States and Canada are losing higher level literates
at a faster rate than they are improving the skills of the least literate
adults. This would seem to call for some serious thinking about the
validity of these assessments and what these findings might mean.

If through our social policies we are going to take credit for the learning
of literacy at the lowest level, are we obliged to take credit for the
un-learning of literacy at the highest levels of literacy?

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
2062 Valley View Blvd.
El Cajon, CA 92019-2059
Tel/fax: (619) 444-9133
Email: tsticht at aznet.net