A ten-slide series on what the word literacy covers. Most of us think it means being able to read the words. The people who measure it ask whether you can find what matters, understand it, weigh it, and act on it. This page has the definition, the test questions the cards describe, every study, and what each one cannot tell you.
The full text of every card, in order, with the card itself under each one. Select a card to open it full size.
Grouped by card. Each source has a summary of what it says, a scope line saying how far it reaches, and a link to the original.
The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is the OECD’s test of adult skills, given in the United States by NCES. Its 2023 framework defines literacy as accessing, understanding, evaluating and reflecting on written texts in order to achieve one’s goals, to develop one’s knowledge and potential and to participate in society. Of the 80 literacy questions in the test’s final pool, 38% ask adults to access information, 44% to understand it, and 19% to evaluate and reflect on it.
Alongside the main questions, the 2023 test includes two short reading-component tasks. In one, a single sentence appears and the adult says whether it makes sense. In the other, the adult reads a short article and picks, from two underlined words, the one that best completes each sentence. In 2023 these results are folded into the literacy scale, where they add precision at the low end; the sentence task is classified Below Level 1.
The paper behind the “simple view of reading.” Its abstract puts the idea in one line: reading equals the product of decoding and comprehension. Because it is a product, strong decoding with weak comprehension still yields weak reading.
The reader sees a short report of a union election with a simple table identifying the three candidates, and is asked which candidate received the fewest votes.
395 English-speaking adults at three primary care clinics were asked to read and explain prescription labels. Among patients reading at or below a sixth-grade level, 70.7% correctly stated the instruction to take two tablets by mouth twice daily, but 34.7% could show how many pills that meant in a day.
The reader sees a simulated website for a community fun run and is asked to identify the link that leads to the organizers’ phone number. The number is not on the opening page. The correct response is to choose Contact Us.
The reader sees a newspaper article and an email about two devices for getting clean water, and is asked to select one sentence in the article and one in the email that describe a criticism common to both devices.
In 2023, 13% of U.S. adults scored at Levels 4 or 5 in literacy, against an OECD average of 12%.
3,446 high school students, a sample matched to the national profile, completed six tasks. Asked to investigate a website that presented itself as a source of factual reports on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two-thirds could not tell news stories from ads on a news site’s home page.
When I say someone can read, I usually mean they can say the words on the page. For a long time I thought that was the same as being literate. It is not, and the people who measure literacy have never said it was.
Their definition has four verbs: accessing, understanding, evaluating, and reflecting. I broke those into six steps because I wanted something I could actually use at my own kitchen table. Can you read it. Can you find the part that matters. Can you say it in your own words. What does it imply. How does it compare. Who is saying it, and what do they gain.
Most of us stop somewhere in the middle and do not notice, because the words went by without any trouble. That is exactly the spot where a contract, a label, or a post can walk right past you.
It is my job to get further up that list, and it is my job to make sure my kids can too. Asking whether they read it tells me nothing. Asking them to tell me what it means tells me everything.