This volume is a companion to Do Adults Have the Skills They Need to Thrive in a Changing World? Survey of Adult Skills 2023, which presents results from the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills.
This volume offers an overview of the “what” and “how” of the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Its primary objective is to help readers understand and interpret the results of the survey. To this end, it summarises, in less technical ways, the methodologies underpinning the design of the survey and its operational aspects. A more comprehensive and technically oriented presentation of the methodological aspects of the survey and its implementation can be found in the Survey of Adult Skills 2023 Technical Report (forthcoming).
This Reader’s Companion addresses four topics:
what the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills measures
how the results from the survey are reported
how the survey was designed and implemented
how the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills is related to previous adult skills surveys and to the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
Chapter 1 discusses the concept of human capital and the extent to which the Survey of Adult Skills can be used to improve the measurement of some of its components. Chapter 2 describes the approach adopted in the survey to measure three key information-processing skills: literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem solving. An important goal of the survey is to identify differences in proficiency between different sub-groups of the population, to better understand how skills are developed, maintained and used, and to analyse how skills impact adults’ life chances. These insights are possible because the survey includes an extensive background questionnaire, whose content is presented in Chapter 4, together with a discussion of the rationale behind its design.
Results of the Survey of Adult Skills are disseminated by reporting average proficiency scores in literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem solving, or the share of adults scoring at different levels of proficiency. But what exactly does it mean to have a particular score or to be at a particular level of proficiency? Chapter 3 provides an answer to these questions, describing in particular what adults with a given score (or at a given level of proficiency) can be expected to be able to do.
To correctly interpret the results from the Survey of Adult Skills, it is essential to understand not only what was measured but also how the survey was conducted. Chapter 5 presents the key aspects of the survey design and implementation and provides an overview of the quality of the resulting data.
The first cycle of the Survey of Adult Skills was conducted over three rounds between 2011 and 2017. It followed two previous adult skills surveys - the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL). And since 2000, the OECD assesses the skills of 15-year-old students through PISA. Chapter 6 describes how these surveys are related, the extent to which they assess the same or similar skills, and how similarities and differences in results should be interpreted.