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Of Special Note |
The primary goal for developing 7 new blocks was to update the pool of questions to reflect NAAL's new assessment design. For example, 5 oral tasks were eliminated as were 13 multiple-choice questions (the 2003 NAAL is 100 percent open-ended, requiring short-answer responses). |
For those blocks that were repeated from the 1992 NALS, the order of tasks within those blocks remained fixed in order to preserve trend data. If the order was changed, it would influence a respondent's performance on the particular block of questions. |
One goal of the 2003 NAAL was to capture the full content domain of adult literacy. As a result, the main assessment had a large number of assessment questions. Of the 152 questions, 65 were repeated from the 1992 NALS (to allow for trend comparisons) and 87 were newly created for the 2003 NAAL.
The 152 NAAL assessment questions were assembled into 26 booklets, each utilizing a Balanced Incomplete Block (BIB) spiraling approach. Also known as matrix sampling, this approach broke a large set of tasks into smaller sets or blocks. Each of these blocks contained a balanced sample of tasks from each of the three types of literacy.