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

levels almost every time. When the bar is higher than their level of proficiency,
however, they can be expected to have a much lower chance of clearing it
successfully.
Once the literacy tasks are placed on their respective scales, using the
criterion described here, it is possible to see how well the interactions among
the task characteristics explain the placement of various tasks along the scales. 1
In investigating the progression of task characteristics across the scales, certain
questions are of interest. Do tasks with similar difficulty values (that is, with
difficulty values near one another on a scale) have certain shared
characteristics? Do these characteristics differ in systematic ways from tasks in
either higher or lower levels of difficulty? Analyses of the interactions between
the materials read and the tasks based on these materials reveal that an ordered
set of information-processing skills appears to be called into play to perform
the range of tasks along each scale.
To capture this ordering, each scale was divided into five levels that reflect
the progression of information-processing skills and strategies: Level 1 (0 to
225), Level 2 (226 to 275), Level 3 (276 to 325), Level 4 (326 to 375), and
Level 5 (376 to 500). These levels were determined not as a result of any
statistical property of the scales, but rather as a result of shifts in the skills and
strategies required to succeed on various tasks along the scales, from simple to
complex.
The remaining pages of this section describe each scale in terms of the
nature of the task demands at each of the five levels. After a brief introduction
to each scale, sample tasks in each level are presented and the factors
contributing to their difficulty are discussed. The aim of these discussions is to
give meaning to the scales and to facilitate interpretation of the results
provided in the first and second sections of this report.
Interpreting the Literacy Levels
Prose Literacy
The ability to understand and use information contained in various kinds of
textual material is an important aspect of literacy. Most of the prose materials
administered in this assessment were expository — that is, they inform, define,
or describe — since these constitute much of the prose that adults read. Some
narrative texts and poems were included, as well. The prose materials were
drawn from newspapers, magazines, books, brochures, and pamphlets and
reprinted in their entirety, using the typography and layout of the original
source. As a result, the materials vary widely in length, density of information,
1 I.S. Kirsch and P.B. Mosenthal. (1990). “Exploring Document Literacy: Variables Underlying the
Performance of Young Adults.” Reading Research Quarterly, 25. pp. 5-30.
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