| Responsible organization(s) |
NCES |
Statistics Canada (the international
coordinating body), working with a steering group that included NCES |
| Goals |
To provide data on English literacy of American adults |
To provide data on internationally comparable literacy of adults in participating countries |
| Fundamental nature of assessment |
Uses texts in their original form that are typically encountered in everyday life of adults in the United States |
Uses texts that have been identified as suitable for use across countries. Thus, they may have been modified or simplified for comparability |
| Domains assessed |
Prose, document, and
quantitative literacy; includes the first-ever health literacy measure |
Prose and document literacy,
numeracy |
| Measurement of trends |
Block and booklet designs based
on the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) to allow accurate measurements
of trends between NAAL and NALS |
No trend data |
| Sample size (completed exercises) |
19,714 |
3,420 in the United States |
| Ages in sample |
16 and older (no upper limit) |
16-65 |
| Target population |
Adults age 16 and older residing
in households and prisons 1 |
Adults 16-65 years old
residing in households and group quarters (e.g.,
halfway houses or homeless shelters) |
| Block/booklet design |
Each respondent receives three
15-minute blocks, and each block contains a few items from each of the three
scales (prose, document, and quantitative), including health related items |
Each respondent receives two
30-minute blocks, and each block contains items from either prose/document
literacy, or numeracy |
| Performance levels |
Developed by the National Academy
of Sciences (NAS) |
Used the 1992 performance levels |
| Analytic procedures |
Reported separately for those who could not attempt the assessment because of literacy-related reasons—not part of the reporting sample |
Wrong answers imputed to all
missing answers that were due to literacy problems—part of the reporting
sample |
| Scoring |
Partial-credit scoring (22 new
items; 5 items from 1992) |
Correct or incorrect |
|
1 NAAL provides a measure of the literacy skills of the prison population separately from the overall population. |
