Prose and document literacy and numeracy are measured on a proficiency scale from 0 to 500 and problem solving is measured on a scale from 0 to 400. Lower proficiency scores correspond to relatively simple tasks and levels of difficulty increase along a continuum to the maximum score.
Table 1 describes the tasks and the corresponding level of difficulty of prose literacy.
An easy task with a difficulty value of 188 required determining the maximum number of days medicine should be taken by reading the medicine label. This task was rated at Level 1 because the person had only to identify one piece of information.
As the level of difficulty increases, the number and nature of distractors in text increases. To achieve a prose literacy score of 377, a person was required to read an announcement from an employee support initiative and list ways the initiative assists people who lost their jobs because of departmental reorganization. The question had multiple phrases the person had to remember while reading the text and the information was organized in a complex format and dispersed under various headings that may or may not have had the conditional information (i.e., people who lost jobs because of departmental reorganization). This task was rated the most difficult because it required a person to provide multiple responses based on text-based inferences from information that had relevant responses embedded in numerous areas and with a set of distractors.