Discussion Announcement

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

Last updated: Wednesday, 10-Jun-2009 13:53:06 EDT