Literacy has been a major policy issue in North America for decades. For instance, starting in the 1970's the United States Department of Education funded several largescale ground breaking surveys of reading comprehension and literacy proficiency among the adult population. The latest of these was the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), conducted between 1989 and 1992. These surveys produced a wealth of data and new insights relevant to literacy measurement, policy and practice.
Whereas early previous studies treated literacy as a condition that adults either have or do not have, the important innovation introduced in more recent surveys has been to measure literacy proficiency along a continuum denoting how well adults use information to function in society. Thus, today, literacy is no longer defined in terms of an arbitrary standard of reading comprehension, distinguishing the few who completely fail the test (the "illiterates") from nearly all those who reach a minimum threshold (those who are "literate").
This new approach led to a rethinking of the nature and magnitude of the literacy issues because the 1992 NALS data did not support the common belief that literacy difficulties beset only a tiny and marginal proportion of the population. Policy makers and researchers associated with the survey discovered that at least one in every four adults lacked the minimum literacy skills needed for coping with everyday life and work in the complex, information-dependent society of North America.
This finding put literacy issues squarely back on the policy agenda. But new questions also began to be asked. Key among them was whether the profiles of literacy skills of adults in North America were any different from those of other industrialized countries. Action on the literacy policy front in Canada and the US was seen as depending in part on an answer to this question.
It was for this reason that National Center for Education Statistics of the United States Department of Education, in close co-operation with Statistics Canada, Human Resources Development Canada and the OECD, initiated the steps and provided the necessary funding to develop the first International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), launched in 1994. Since the mid-1990s, comparable surveys of adult literacy skills have been undertaken in more than 20 countries. Together the economic output of these countries accounts for over 50 percent of the world's entire gross domestic product. The Canadian component of the survey was funded by Human Resources Development Canada — The Applied Research Branch and the National Literacy Secretariat. The analysis was conducted for Statistics Canada by Dr, Tuijnman. The report shows the literacy performance of participating countries, using the United States as the reference country. As such, the literacy data now available contribute importantly to an understanding of the demand and supply of skills in North America functioning in the global, knowledge-based economy.