Literacy in everyday life

From PLN

Literacy in everyday life

by Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest April 2007

NCES has released Literacy in Everyday Life, a report providing extensive information on the literacy of American adults and changes in their performance since 1992. It also examines the relationship between literacy and several demographics. Findings include the following:

Women have closed the gap with men in Quantitative literacy and have surpassed men in Document and Prose literacy.
Younger and older adults have lower literacy than adults in other age groups.
Median weekly earnings increased with each level of literacy.
At each higher level of Prose literacy, more adults were employed full time.
The percentage of parents who never helped their school-age child with homework declined at each higher Prose literacy level.
About half of US citizens of voting age with low literacy reported voting in the presidential election of 2000 compared with 84 % of citizens with proficient literacy.

Full results are available here. PDFs of the complete report, as well as excerpts are available here.