ADULT LITERACY IN
THE UNITED STATES

A COMPENDIUM OF QUANTITATIVE DATA

This Compendium presents a large body of quantitative data obtained in numerous studies since the U.S. Army introduced the mass testing of adult cognitive skills in World War I. Concepts from educational research and the field of cognitive science are used to interpret these assessments. The data and interpretations provide new insights into the nature of adult literacy and its development. These insights form the basis for suggestions about how to produce more effective approaches to adult literacy assessment and education.

The Compendium and its interpretive comments should be of use in staff development programs for adult educators. It can serve as a resource for university courses in psychological testing and for organizations engaged in the development of adult literacy assessments. It can also be used directly by adult literacy teachers, their students, and interested others as informal checks of how their own literacy skills compare to the skills of others across the last seventy- five years. This form of self-checking using test items from different time periods can also reveal the extent to which literacy assessments reflect the cultural context of the time.

A Cognitive Science Framework for
Interpreting the Assessments of Adult Literacy

In all of the literacy assessments reviewed in the Compendium, a similar process was followed by those administering the tests. First, instructions were given to groups or individuals about the tests they were to take. Then, some form of test was administered that (1) presented some information display, either spoken or in a graphic format, such as written language, (2) posed some mental reasoning task to be performed on the information displayed, (3) required some responses to be made by the examinees that were (4) used to arrive at a score for each person in the group, that (5) was used to make inferences about people's cognitive abilities that could be used to (6) makes inferences about how well people will perform in some other context beyond the test situation, such as in a training program, on a job, or in a community activity.

Figure 1 presents a simple conception of a human cognitive system at work in a test environment like that just described. The person possesses a long term memory that contains the person's body of knowledge, including among other things, language knowledge and knowledge about how to do things (procedural knowledge), including grammar and reasoning processes. To a large extent, all of the assessments reviewed herein can be considered as attempts to understand what knowledge the person possesses and/or what tasks the person can accomplish by drawing on the knowledge and reasoning processes in the cognitive system.

What Figure 1 makes distinct are the differences between the knowledge stored in long term memory and the language, reasoning and other information processing processes that are used in working memory to represent and think about knowledge.