The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS)

The 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) was the first multi-country and multi-language assessment of adult literacy. Initially conducted in eight industrialized countries, the survey's goals were to develop scales for comparisons of literacy performance among people with a wide range of abilities, and to compare literacy across cultures and languages. Since 1994, additional countries have been surveyed, bringing the total to 20 - Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. IALS provides the world’s first reliable and comparable estimates of the level and distribution of literacy skills in the adult population, and offered new insights into the factors that influence the development of adult skills at home and at work.

The survey was sponsored by the National Literacy Secretariat and the Applied Research Branch of Human Resources Development Canada and was managed by Statistics Canada in cooperation with the OECD, Eurostat, and UNESCO. Key support was given by the U.S. Educational Testing Service, the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, and survey and educational researchers in all the participating countries.

The results of the survey shed light on the social and economic impacts of different levels of literacy, the underlying factors which cause them and how they might be amenable to policy intervention. IALS also dispelled the old notion that individuals are either literate or illiterate and introduced a new concept of literacy as a continuum of skills ranging from quite limited to very high. The IALS built on this new view of literacy, defining it as: the ability to understand and employ printed information in daily activities, at home, at work and in the community, to achieve one's goals and to develop one's knowledge and potential.

In order to measure proficiency levels in the processing of information, IALS examined three literacy domains: prose, document and quantitative. For each domain, literacy proficiency was measured on a scale ranging from 0 to 500. The scale was then divided into five broad literacy levels.