Overview of the Compendium

Part I: Assessing Adult Literacy Skills.

Part I of the Compendium includes data from the testing of adults to determine the distribution of literacy skills in the population. Data are summarized for the period beginning with the Army's introduction of mass testing in 1917 during World War I and ending some seventy-five years later in the 1992 assessment of adult literacy skills by the U.S. Department of Education. Data gathered in studies falling between these two points in time are also summarized.

An interesting observation is that, despite considerable debates about what sorts of tasks adults should be asked to perform to indicate their degree of literacy, whenever test specialists, educators and citizen groups have gotten together to decide how to assess adult literacy, the actual tasks that end up in assessment instruments look remarkably similar over the seventy- five year period. The major findings or trends in the data also look remarkably similar.

Part I of the Compendium presents not only summaries of the data on adult literacy skills from this seventy-five year span of America's history. Additionally, it presents numerous actual test items that were used in these studies to assess adult literacy skills. This permits readers to study these items to determine for themselves whether they appear to be suitable tasks that literate adults in the United States should be able to perform. Also, it permits adult literacy teachers to use these items with their students as informal indicators of literacy development in adult literacy programs. Indeed, both adult teachers and adult learners (and others) may find it interesting, and informative, to try their skill at doing tasks from across time, such as items from World Wars I (1917) and II (1940s), or the 1930's and 1970's.

Part II: Special Topics

Part II of the Compendium examines three special topics in adult literacy assessment. First, relationships between listening and reading vocabulary and comprehension are examined. As suggested by the developmental model of literacy summarized above, children first develop a fair amount of knowledge and language ability before they formally begin learning reading and writing. Then, when they enter school, one of the primary aims of reading instruction is to permit the child to access oral language encoded information via the printed display.

When applied to adults, it is frequently believed that most less literate adults have followed the oral language development sequence in the developmental model, and that they have acquired extensive oral language vocabularies and large amounts of conceptual knowledge. It is thought that their literacy problems are due mostly to their failure to learn how to "break the code" of written language. In this case, then, the simple and expeditious remedy for the problem is to provide a course of instruction in phonics and additional "decoding" skills. Then, once the adult has "broken the code" he or she will be able to bring a vast amount of vocabulary and oral language comprehension skills to bear on reading and understanding the written language.

But the studies of listening and reading indicate that, despite some individual differences, as a trend, less literate adults tend to perform as poorly on tests of spoken language vocabulary and comprehension, when decoding written language is not part of the task, as they do on reading tests. Thus, brief tutoring on the decoding of written language will generally not suffice to bring the less literate to the higher levels of literacy being called for today.

The second and third special topics deal with the intergenerational relationships of parent's education to the literacy skills of their children and with relationships of literacy to occupational status and job performance.