1. Introduction

The Adult Literacy and Life-skills Survey (ALL) aims at assessing a broad range of skills important in everyday life and essential for social, professional and economic success. As we enter the 21^st century, society changes at an increasingly fast pace and citizens are challenged by demands for greater flexibility as well as reflected and planned behavior. That problem-solving skills constitute one of the crucial life-skills is widely accepted. Problem solving is ranked as an important key qualification by labor market experts (see Binkley, Sternberg, Jones, and Nohara, 1999) as well as in the literature on vocational training and education (Didi, Fay, Kloft, and Vogt, 1993). Recent discussions of lifelong learning also point to problem solving as one of the major competencies to be fostered in a lifelong learning process. Furthermore, problem-solving skills were defined as an important outcome of schooling by OECD experts (OECD, 1997; Ryjchen and Salganik, 2000), and are often identified as high-level curricular aims (see, e.g., Svecnik, 1999). These few examples suffice to illustrate the importance of assessing problemsolving skills in the context of the ALL study.

Research on problem solving has a long tradition within both academic psychology and applied human resources research. One major challenge while developing a framework for problem solving for the ALL study was to adapt the findings of this research to the constraints imposed by a large-scale international comparative study. In order to do this, we will focus on an essential subset of problem solving, analytical problem solving.

The following chapters give a brief overview of problem solving from a scientific point of view and specify what is to be understood by analytical problem solving within the context of ALL. Once it is clearly established what is meant by analytical problem solving, the assessment rationale and assessment instruments for this domain are explained. Finally, initial results from the pilot study in five different countries will be presented together with a description of the problem-solving scale.