Serving Adults  
RSS

 

Type Title Status Posted By
pdf
 More American Adults Read Literature According to New NEA Study
More American Adults Read Literature According to New NEA Study Contact: Sally Gifford 202.682.5606 giffords@arts.gov Literary reading on the rise for first time in history of Arts Endowment survey January 12, 2009 Washington, D.C. -- For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read.
User Portrait
pdf
 National Assessment of Adult Literacy
IES National Center for Education Statistics U.S. Department of Education, Institute for Education Sciences (Web release Jan. 8, 2009) Online availability: download, view and print report as pdf file at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009482.pdf National Assessment of Adult Literacy: Indirect County and State Estimates of the Percentage of Adults at the Lowest Literacy Level for 1992 and 2003 Description: The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) assessed the English literacy skills of a nationally representative sample of 18,500 U.S. adults (age 16 and older) residing in private households. NAAL is the first national assessment of adult literacy since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). The NAAL and NALS produced direct estimates of Prose, Document, and Quantitative literacy, each reported on a 0 to 500 scale and on four performance levels: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate, and Proficient based on this scale. This report, describes the statistical methodology used to produce the model-dependent—indirect—estimates of the percentages of adults at the lowest literacy level for individual states and counties for 1992 and 2003. The county and state indirect estimates themselves are provided at the NAAL website http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL (the state indirect estimates are also provided in appendices to this report). The measure chosen for the indirect estimation is the percentage of adults lacking Basic prose literacy skills (BPLS). The literacy of adults who lack BPLS ranges from being unable to read and understand any written information in English to being able to locate easily identifiable information in short, commonplace prose text, but nothing more advanced. It should be noted that adults who were not able to take the assessment because they were not able to communicate in English or Spanish (i.e. language barrier cases) are included in the indirect estimates and classified as lacking BPLS because they can be considered to be at the lowest level of English literacy.
User Portrait