* This item was also used in the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS).

In the Document literacy assessment, 73 percent of the tasks demanded 300 level skills or lower, while 57.2 percent of young adults possessed 300 level skills or higher. Thus, the Document tasks tended to be skewed toward the easy end of literacy task difficulties. Overall, the average percent correct for Document literacy tasks was 83.3 (Table 4.1, page IVY of the source cited on page 99). Whites scored 85.9, Hispanics 77.6, and Blacks 71.8 percent correct on the average for Document tasks. While 65.4 percent of Whites scored at the 300 skill level or higher, only 37.0 percent of Hispanics and 19.8 percent of Blacks scored at the 300 skill level or higher (see Figure 4.2, page IV-18 of the source document cited on page 99). Note that, if one focuses on the fact that only one in five Blacks were at the 300 skill level or above on the Document scale, one might infer a very low performance level for Blacks on Document tasks. Yet, overall, Blacks performed over 70 percent of the Document tasks correctly. This apparent contradiction results from the fact that to be at the 300 level of skill requires that people possess an 80% probability of being able to perform tasks that are at that level of difficulty. But people with lower levels of skill have a greater than zero probability of being able to correctly perform 300 level tasks. When the latter are taken into consideration, as in calculating the overall average percent correct, then a much greater percentage of the population may be seen to be able to perform Document tasks across the full range of difficulty levels, from easy to hard, than are able to perform tasks at the 300 level of difficulty or above.