Chapter 3

“Relevance” at National Levels in Relation to Foundational
Concepts of Literacy in Functional Context Education

For how many adults is adult literacy education relevant? A major effort for determining the “relevance” of or “scale of need” for adult literacy education took place in the mid-1990s when Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States joined with what was eventually nineteen other member nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to take part in the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). Using door-to-door sampling methods, the IALS developed performance tasks for three different measurement scales: prose, document and quantitative. For each scale adults were assigned to five literacy levels (Level 1-low to Level 5-high literacy). Additionally, the IALS developed a scale for the adult’s self-assessment of their literacy ability including rating categories of poor, moderate, good, excellent (and no response).

Using the document performance tasks, 23.7 percent of United States adults ages 16-65 were assigned to literacy level 1, the lowest level of literacy, while in Canada the percentage assigned to document literacy Level 1 was 18.2, and in the United Kingdom 23.3 percent of adults were assigned to document literacy Level 1. Similar percentages, with a little variation, held for the prose and quantitative literacy scales and the assignment of adults to Literacy Level 1 on those scales.

Using the performance scales then, in the mid-1990s, literacy education would be relevant for about one fifth of adults aged 16-65 in these three countries. This is about 32 million adults in the US, 3.3 million in Canada, and 7 million in the UK.

Self-Perceived Literacy and Numeracy Skills. Using the adult’s self-assessments of their reading abilities for work and daily life, grouped by the document scale results, fewer than 5 percent of adults in either Canada, the UK, or the U. S. rated their reading as poor. Using a 5 percent estimate for these three nations, some 8 million adults in the U. S., less than 1 million in Canada, and fewer than 2 million in the U. K. would consider adult literacy education to be relevant to them. Similar results held for self-assessments of writing and numeracy and with self-assessments grouped by the prose and quantitative scales.

If it is adult’s self-perceived need for literacy education that determines whether or not they will enroll in literacy programs, then it might be useful in national assessments of adult literacy to delve further into adult’s self-perceptions, what explains their self-perceptions, what information would help them better assess their literacy skills, and to provide respondents who assess themselves as poor in literacy with information about how they might locate adult literacy programs. It might also be useful to determine other education needs or desires so that the adult education and literacy provision systems in these and other nations might better align themselves with adult educational needs.