International Literacy Explorer - Statistics - Introduction

Measuring Literacy in National Reporting Systems

To begin, let us review some basic standards that can help you evaluate the quality of any possible assessment method to be used for describing the literacy situation in your country. These include:

Reliability & validity: The measurement of each person's literacy should cover all key aspects of literacy and should be free of errors.
Practicality: The method for collecting information about people's literacy should be practical (as easy and inexpensive as feasible).
Comparability: To be useful, the assessment method used should yield scores or estimates that allow comparisons between countries/groups.
Clarity: Assessments should yield data that consumers (e.g., educators, policymakers, citizens) can easily understand and interpret.

With these criteria in mind, we can now examine methods for collecting information about literacy skills.

Approaches to Literacy Measurement

There are two basic approaches to measuring literacy:

Direct assessment

allows us to determine people's literacy levels based on their performance on a test or on literacy tasks given by an examiner.

Indirect assessment

allows us to estimate people's literacy level from "proxy" information that is known to be (indirectly) related to people's literacy, such as people's number of years of schooling.

The criteria listed (Reliability/Validity, Practicality, Comparability, Clarity) cannot all be met by any single measurement approach. Such criteria are often in conflict (e.g., a highly valid method costs more, is less practical).

To learn about the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, choose:

Direct Assessment

Indirect Assessment

Back to Introduction or move on to The Limitations to Literacy Statistics