What Do We Know About the Literacy Ability of Canadians?

Several studies of Adult Literacy in Canada have been carried out since the 1980s. The latest of these surveys was the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), carried out in twenty OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries between 1994 and 1999.

The IALS Rating Scale

The scale used to rate the complexity of ‘literacy tasks’ in the IALS survey is the result of sophisticated measurement science and survey data from large population samples. It is based on Item Response Theory (IRT) which relates the difficulty of questions to the literacy proficiencies of survey respondents. Tasks are assigned a difficulty level on a 500 point scale in terms of the scores of the survey population. In turn, the abilities of individual survey takers are described in terms of their ability to complete literacy tasks at a known level of difficulty on the scale. If this sounds like a circular process, you are probably not a psychometrician. As such, you can safely leave the underlying mathematics to someone else.

Literacy Proficiency Levels

Just as we lump T-shirt sizes into ‘small,’ ‘medium’ and ‘large,’ literacy proficiency is grouped into five levels. Level 1 indicates the lowest skill level, while 5 is the highest. The relationship of the five proficiency levels to the 500 point difficulty scale is shown in Figure 1 on the next page. The chart in Figure 1 shows that literacy proficiency is distributed according to a normal curve. Some small number of Canadians have a high degree of proficiency at Level 5 (about 3-5% of the population in the U.S. and Canada). Another 16% have skills that are rudimentary at Level 1. The rest of the population is ranged across Levels 2, 3 and 4. For the purposes of citizenship, employment, and full participation in Canadian society, those people in levels 1 and 2–some 40% of the population–are considered to be handicapped by their limited literacy proficiency.

While the scale suggests that the gradations in task difficulty and literacy proficiency are continuous, there are significant differences and discontinuities among tasks at the various levels. As well, we are able to characterize people by the level of literacy proficiency they demonstrate. These descriptions of task difficulty by level can be found in the ‘Benchmarks’ section of the Appendices. Several studies relating literacy level to social characteristics are cited in the bibliography.