This chapter presents 10 international indicators of literacy proficiency that allow comparisons to be made between populations and across nations. The first four are used to examine the condition of literacy among youth and young adults aged 16-19 and 20-25.7 They allow readers to judge the overall level of literacy ability of the young population, to examine the literacy ability of recent high school dropouts and to contrast this with the level attained by graduates from colleges and universities.
The fourth indicator describes the degree of relative inequality in literacy scores among young persons. The four indicators presenting the results for the young population are replicated for the adult population aged 25-65. This allows the reader not only to examine the levels of literacy achieved by adults in different nations, but also to draw comparisons of relative literacy performance among young and older adults.8 The final two indicators are used to study the literacy profiles of two specific populations of special interest to policy makers: adults aged 45-65 and second-language foreign-born population.
As mentioned in the Introduction, the IALS employed three scales for measuring and reporting literacy scores. Because of space limitations the data values and graphics presented in this chapter are all based on the prose literacy scale.9 Country results may differ from scale to scale. For this reason the data values for all 10 indicators and all three scales are reported in Annex A, National Scores and Standard Errors. Readers will be alerted in the text below when results for the United States differ dramatically across the three scales.
Readers are advised that, where possible, standard errors of the estimates are provided in the data tables in Annex A. These errors should be taken into account when comparing national scores.10 To facilitate this, the countries in the graphs presented in this chapter are grouped into three categories:
7. Values for the United States youth population are derived from the 1992 U.S. National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) because a sampling anomaly involving students residing on college campus limits the international comparability of U.S. IALS data for this age cohort. The 1992 NALS data are fully compatible with the 1994 IALS data set because special care was used by the U.S. National Educational Testing Service to properly link the scales used for the two surveys.
8. On average, people increase their literacy scores on the IALS test by about 10 points for each additional year they attend school or college.
9. The prose literacy scale is chosen because it is the one used by the National Education Goals Panel for benchmarking progress in reaching U.S. National Goal 6: Adult Literacy and Life-long Learning.
10. The indicators for the young population are generally based on small sample sizes. Consequently, the standard errors of the estimates tend to be large. As a result many of the differences between population groups are not statistically significant.