Dear Colleagues, 
I'm pleased to announce the following Guest Discussion, which will be
held during the week of May 26 - 29, 2009:
Basic Reading Skills and the Literacy of the America's Least Literate
Adults: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy
(NAAL) Supplemental Studies
Description
The 2003 NAAL assessed the English literacy skills of a nationally
representative sample of 18,500 U.S. adults (age 16 and older) residing
in private households. NAAL is the first national assessment of adult
literacy since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). The NAAL
project comprised three assessment components: the main literacy
assessment, the Fluency Addition to NAAL (FAN), and the Adult Literacy
Supplemental Assessment (ALSA). Results from the main literacy
assessment are reported as averages and as the percentage of adults in
each of four literacy levels: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate, and
Proficient. This report focuses on results from the FAN and the ALSA. 

The Adult Literacy Supplemental Assessment (ALSA) was administered to
adults unable to successfully answer a screening set of 7 easy
questions. Instead of completing the main literacy assessment, these
adults completed the ALSA, which gathered information about their letter
reading, word reading, word identification, and basic comprehension
skills. 

The Fluency Addition to NAAL (FAN) measured the accuracy as well as the
fluency with which adults decode, and read words and passages. 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.
Guest Participants: 
Sheida White, Project Officer
National Center for Education Statistics
 
Dr. White directs the National Assessment of Adult Literacy and the
National Assessment of Educational Progress Writing Item Development at
the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education
Statistics. She recently led the development of a national health
literacy assessment and of a statistical methodology to estimate the
percentage of U.S. adults lacking basic literacy skills for all states
and counties. She works to make literacy data more useful for the public
and has published more than 40 books, articles, and other publications
in the fields of literacy and assessment. She holds a Ph.D. in
sociolinguistics from Georgetown University.
 
John Sabatini, Senior Research Scientist
Educational Testing Service
 
Dr. Sabatini is a Senior Research Scientist in the Research &
Development Division at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ.
He has conducted research, curriculum development, and evaluation in
areas of reading acquisition and disabilities, assessment, cognitive
psychology, and educational technology, with a primary focus on adults
and adolescents.  Currently, he is the principal investigator of an IES
funded grant to develop comprehension assessments for struggling
adolescent and adult readers and a NICHD/Dept of Education/National
Institute for Literacy grant, Relative Effectiveness of Reading Programs
for Adults.   He provides technical and research advice to national and
international surveys including the National Assessments of Adult
Literacy (NAAL), Programme for the International Assessment of Adult
Competencies (PIACC), Progress in International Reading Literacy Study
(PISA), and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS). Dr. Sabatini
received his doctorate at the University of Delaware in cognition and
instruction with a focus on literacy.
Recommended preparations for this discussion:
The full report is available as a PDF file at:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009481
 
For our discussion, please read the Executive Summary of the report on
pages iii through vi. 
 
Resources of interest:
 
National Assessment of Adult Literacy 
http://nces.ed.gov/naal/
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/assessment/attachments/20090513/d6d171f4/attachment.html