A Closer Look at Low-Performing Adult Readers in the Scandinavian Countries

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on low-performing adult readers in the Scandinavian countries, seeking to identify and describe some of the literacy-related problems that they face. Following a presentation of the Reading Components Assessment (RCA) used in PIAAC (Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies), we provide profiles for those informants who completed the RCA. Then we compare the RCA results of adults having well-functioning literacy skills with the results of adults identified as low-performing readers. The presentation includes both results for items correct and information about the time used to complete the items. The findings indicate that the gap in performance on the Component task sets is wider between adults scoring Below level 1 in literacy and those scoring on Level 1 than the corresponding gap between Level 1 and Level 2. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Low-performing adult readers
• PIAAC
• reading components
• print vocabulary
• sentence processing
• passage comprehension

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 International Adult Literacy Survey.

2 Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey.

3 Australian data are not available in the public use files.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway (Grant 228298/H20 SkillsReal).