6. Summary

As noted above the ALL study was designed to respond to a range of important public policy issues related to adult education, skills and learning.

To fulfill these goals Statistics Canada and US National Center for Education Statistics funded an ambitious program of research and development designed to:

• identify a set of skill domains grounded in theory and thought to be related to success in life and to a well functioning economy and society
• develop approaches to measurement that afford valid, reliable, comparable and interpretable profiles of skill for heterogeneous populations within and between countries, within the natural constraints of a household survey of adults
• associate these skill profiles with a range of background variables designed to reflect the social distribution of skill, the factors that influence the level and distribution of skill, the health, social, educational and economic outcomes that are associated with different levels of skill at the micro, meso and macro level, and individual^s own assessment of his/her skill and its relationship to their economic and social success.

  In keeping with the importance of the issues at play, the ALL survey set demanding scientific standards for inclusion in the final international comparative assessment.

Development failed to realize measures of sufficient quality in three domains:

• practical intelligence
• teamwork, and,
• information and communication technology

As a result the ALL survey provides valid, reliable comparable and interpretable profiles of prose literacy, document literacy, numeracy and problem solving.

The profiles for prose literacy and document literacy will be linked at the item level to permit an analysis of the evolution of the skill profile since 1994 and to identify the factors that seem to have the greatest impact on change (e.g. skill gain, and/or skill in adulthood or the quality and quantity of initial education).