National Assessment of
Educational Progress
Literacy: Profiles of
America's Young Adults-1986

In 1985 the National Assessment of Educational Progress studied the literacy skills of young adults (21- 25 years old) living in households in the 48 contiguous United States. Like all previous surveys of adult literacy, the 1985 survey gave data on the percent of young adults who performed various literacy tasks correctly. However, the report primarily reported literacy scores using scale scores for three different domains of literacy tasks: prose, document, and quantitative literacy tasks. The scale scores for each of three different types of literacy task domains ranged from 0 to 500, with the majority of tasks (items) falling between 200 and 400. Pages 100 through 112 present samples of items from the young adult literacy survey (YALS). More explanations about the scale scores will be found on those pages.

To show how performance on the YALS compares with earlier adult literacy assessments, the figure below shows skill levels on the prose, document, and quantitative scales in terms of average percent correct scores for people at different levels of education. The figure also shows on the right side the relationships among education level and the engagement in various literacy practices (reading books, magazines, and newspapers). Both the skill and practices data resemble the findings of Buswell in 1937 (p. 43) and the Adult Functional Reading Study of 1973 (p. 63). People with more education read more and they have higher reading skills.