April 8, 2009

Questioning the “internationally-accepted level of literacy required to cope
in a modern society?”

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

In a series of reports based on studies from the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Statistics Canada, there have been
claims that almost half (48 percent) of Canada’s adults aged 16 years and
above possess low literacy skills below the “internationally-accepted level
of literacy required to cope in a modern society.”

This “internationally-accepted level of literacy” is said to be Level 3 of
the five levels of literacy skills identified by the international Adult
Literacy and Life-skills (ALL) survey and the International Adult Literacy
and Skills Survey (IALSS) of 2003.

In a 2008 report (www.ccl-cca.ca), entitled Reading the Future: Planning to
meet Canada’s future literacy needs, the Canadian Council on Learning
projected that by the year 2031 more than 15 million adults “will continue
to have low literacy skills below IALSS Level 3, or the
internationally-accepted level of literacy required to cope in a modern
society.”

There are, however, several problems with this projection. For one thing,
the ALL or IALSS definition of Level 3 as the internationally-accepted
level of literacy required to cope in a modern society has been questioned
in a report from the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, National Research
Council (NAS/NRC). The NAS/NRC report states that the methodology of the
NALS did not provide information about the "mismatch" of skills of adults
and demands of the economy, or anything else for that matter, but that
"unsupported inferences " along these lines were made by some.
Unfortunately, the ALL and IALSS reports continue this practice of drawing 
“unsupported inferences" about the levels of literacy needed by adults to
meet the demands of contemporary societies in the industrialized world.

The NAS/NRC report indicates that just because a person is assigned to Level
1 or Level 2 does not mean he or she  cannot perform tasks at higher levels.
In fact NALS data indicated that adults might be able to perform as many as
25 percent, 50 percent or even more tasks at higher levels, they simply
could not perform them with an 80  percent probability of success which is
the level of performance demanded by the international surveys to be called
proficient at a given level of the literacy scales of measurement.

 The NAS/NRC report stated that "The committee judged that a probability
level of 80 percent was overly stringent given the uses of the assessment
results." The NAS/NRC report presents data indicating that from a strictly
statistical point of view, the  most valid, response probability for
setting proficiency levels is .50. The .50 probability level is the point
at which the errors in making statements about whether adults can or cannot
perform certain literacy tasks are equal. Using the .80 response standard,
one is four times as likely to make the mistake of saying that someone
cannot do certain  literacy tasks when in fact they can as they are to say
a person can do literacy tasks when in fact they cannot. This greatly
increases the percentage of adults who will be declared of low literacy.

Another problem with the international adult literacy surveys is that they
do not account for the fact that a given adult has skills in each of the
three measurement scales of prose, document, and quantitative literacy.
This provides a quantity of skill summed across the three scales not
indexed by any one scale. So in addition to the fact that adults in the
lowest levels of literacy could actually perform tasks above that level,
they also had skills in three different domains for which the assessments
do not account as integrated competence in literacy that adults may
possess.

Although the standardized tests of the international assessments have been
used to declare almost half of Canadian adults as unable to cope with the
literacy demands of modern society,  95 percent of adults think they read
well or very well, and certainly well enough to do their jobs, including
over two-thirds of those adults in the lowest levels of literacy.

Consistent with the adult’s self-perceptions of their skills, the
international Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) report developed a
methodology for examining the mismatch between workers skills and their job
demands for these skills. The report said that some 60 percent of adults had
literacy and numeracy skills that matched their job demands for these
skills, 20 percent were working in jobs with demands that exceeded their
skills, and another 20 percent were working in jobs for which they were
over-skilled in literacy and numeracy. So 80 percent of adults had skills
that matched or exceeded their job demands. This seems to contradict the
idea that some 48 percent of Canadian adults do not possess the literacy
skills to cope in modern society.

In a 2009 report entitled  “Addressing Canada’s Literacy Challenge: A
Cost/Benefit Analysis”  by DataAngel Policy Research Inc., the authors
argue for increasing investments in adult literacy education to get all
Canadian adults up to Level 3 of the international adult literacy surveys,
which they assert is “
 the level thought to be needed to take full
advantage of opportunities present in the global economy.” But then in a
somewhat surprising turn of the argument, they go on to indicate that their
analyses suggest that if this actually happens, then “
the Canadian economy
will have difficulty absorbing the additional supply of literacy skills.
This reinforces the need for measures to increase the demand for literacy
skill to complement the supply-side investments.”

So on the one hand it is argued that some 48 percent of Canadian do not have
the skills needed to cope with the demands of modern society, but on the
other hand if they are all educated to raise their skills to Level 3, the
skills presumed to be needed to cope adequately, then the economy would
have an oversupply of Level 3 literate adults.  So actions would have to be
taken to increase the demand for these more highly literate adults. Perhaps
this means that jobs and other things (health materials; government
announcements, etc.) would need to be made more difficult so they would
demand the new numbers of adults with higher literacy skills!

All this suggests a great deal of confusion in the thinking about the
measurement of adult literacy skills, the validity of the supply and demand
analyses of the need for adult literacy, and the cost-benefit analyses of
raising half of Canadian adult literacy skills to Level 3 of the
international adult literacy surveys.  As things stand now, even though
Canada’s federal government, through Statistics Canada, may state that
almost half of Canada’s adults are too low in literacy to meet the
requirements of the “knowledge society”, some 95 percent of adults don’t
think they have a literacy problem. Maybe that is why adult literacy
educators report that their programs attract so few adults. Apparently,
Canada's federal government itself doesn’t believe its own numbers about
the adult literacy “crisis” or it would not have cut $17 million from the
adult literacy budget some two years ago and never restored it.

All things considered, there appears to be a need for new thinking about the
scale of need for adult literacy education in Canada, and other
industrialized nations who have used the IALSS or ALL to characterize the
literacy skills of their adults. A new approach to establishing the scale
of need for adult literacy education should include one which would 
address not just the skills, but also the motivations of adults for seeking
further literacy education.  After all, if adults do not think they have a
skills problem, they are not likely to seek education to improve them.

Thomas G. Sticht
tsticht at aznet.net