Adult Literacy in America - National Center for Education Statistics ...

Estimating Performance Across the Literacy Levels
The literacy levels not only provide a way to explore the progression of
information-processing demands across the scales; they can also be used to
explore the likelihood that individuals in each level will succeed on tasks of
varying difficulty.
The following graphs (Figure 3.2) display the probability that
individuals performing at selected points on each scale will give a correct
response to tasks with varying difficulty values. We see, for example, that a
person whose prose proficiency is 150 has less than a 50 percent chance of
giving a correct response to the Level 1 tasks. Individuals whose proficiency
scores were at the 200 point, on the other hand, have an almost 80 percent
probability of responding correctly to these tasks.
In terms of task demands, we can infer that adults performing at the 200
point on the prose scale are likely to be able to locate a single piece of
information in a brief piece of text where there is no distracting information, or
when any distracting information is located apart from the desired information.
They are likely to have far more difficulty with the types of tasks that occur in
Levels 2 through 5, however. For example, they would have only about a 30
percent chance of performing the average task in Level 2 correctly and only
about a 10 percent chance of success, or less, on the more challenging tasks
found in Levels 3, 4, and 5.
In contrast, readers at the 300 point on the prose scale have an 80 percent
(or higher) likelihood of success on tasks in Levels 1, 2, and 3. This means that
they demonstrate skill identifying information in fairly dense text without
organizational aids. They can also integrate, compare, and contrast information
that is easily identified in the text. On the other hand, they are likely to have
difficulty with tasks that require them to make higher level inferences, to take
conditional information into account, and to use specialized knowledge. The
probabilities of their performing these Level 4 tasks successfully are just under
50 percent, and on the Level 5 tasks their likelihood of responding correctly
falls to under 20 percent.
Section III ......101