As a country participating in the first round of data collection for the international Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) survey, the Canadian component, under the heading of the International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey (IALSS), was implemented according to the standards provided in the document ‘Standards and Guidelines for the Design and Implementation of the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey’. These standards establish the minimum design and implementation requirements covering the complete range from survey planning to survey documentation.
The elements of functional literacy and life skills in IALSS are evaluated through psychometric measures of proficiency in the skill domains of prose literacy, document literacy, numeracy, and problem solving. Every question, or set of related questions, is based on an item. The set of all items are organized into smaller sets of tasks, or blocks: four 30-minute blocks of literacy items (i.e., prose and document literacy), two 30-minute blocks of numeracy items, and two 30-minute blocks of problem solving items. The blocks are combined in pairs using a Balanced Incomplete Block (BIB) assessment design to arrive at 28 booklets.
The booklets were distributed amongst the sample according to the design for the entire Canadian sample, over and beyond the minimum requirement of respondents from each language tested. As each booklet can take upwards of an hour to administer, each respondent was asked to complete only one; no one was required to take the entire set of tasks. The method of spreading the blocks across booklets substantially reduced the burden on respondents. The data collection activity was also closely monitored in order to obtain approximately the same number of complete cases for each task booklet, except for four task booklets containing either only numeracy items or only problem solving items: these booklets required a larger number of complete cases.