Skills for Life – Essential Skills and Workplace Literacy

Slide 13

First multi-country / multi-language assessment of adult literacy.
Between 1994 and 1998, 21 countries fully participated.
Goals:
- to develop scales to compare literacy performance among people with a wide range of abilities.
- to compare literacy across cultures and languages.
Sponsored by the NLS and HRDC; managed by Statistics Canada in cooperation with the OECD, Eurostat, and UNESCO.

Prose Literacy: the knowledge and skills needed to understand and use information from text, including editorials, news stories, brochures and instruction manuals;
Document Literacy: the knowledge and skills required to locate and use information contained in various formats, including job applications, payroll forms, transportation schedules, maps, tables, graphics labels;
Numeracy: the knowledge and skills required to understand, use, interpret and communicate mathematical information contained in different life situations such as balancing an account, figuring out a tip, completing an order form, calculating interest.

World’s first reliable comparison of literacy skills in the adult population.
Showed impacts and causes of different levels of literacy.
Proved literacy skills are policy-amenable.
Demonstrated that literacy is a continuum of skills ranging from quite limited to very high.
Introduced a new 5 point rating scale.
Confirmed that literacy skills can and should be taught
Showed us that it is not about whether or not one can read but how well one can read and how well one NEEDS to be able to read.

Level 1: person with very poor skills – may be unable to determine correct medicine dosage to administer.
Level 2: can only deal with materials that are simple, clearly laid, out and in which tasks are not too complex.
Level 3: considered minimum level required to deal with the demands of everyday life and to work in a modern economy and knowledge-based society. Person can integrate and synthesize information and solve more complex problems.
Level 4 and 5: respondents who demonstrate a command of higher order information processing skills. (Can’t get a large enough sample of level 5’s to differentiate statistically from level 4).

IALS findings: In 1994, a significant portion of Canadians were at the two lowest levels for prose, document literacy, and numeracy.

Level 1 is 23%

Level 2 is 25%

Level 3 is 32%

and Level 4/5 is 20%

Source: Matching Canadians’ Literacy Attainment to Actual Occupational Requirements, May 2001.

IALS findings: Per cent of the population aged 16-65 at each prose literacy level

(source: Literacy in the Information Age, 2000)

Graph is not of sufficient quality to describe.