PIAAC assesses the level of core skills possessed by adults in participating countries. It will provide information on the skills individuals used at work and about themselves and their lives.
PIAAC is an assessment of literacy in the information age, understood as the “interest, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use socio-cultural tools, including digital technology and communication tools, to access, manage, integrate and evaluate information, construct new knowledge and communicate with others”.
Data from the study of Adult Skills allows investigation of the links between key information-processing skills and a range of variables, constituting a rich evidence base for policy-relevant analysis. In particular, data from this study facilitates a better understanding of:
An important element of the “added value” of PIAAC compared with national studies is its international comparative dimension. The PIAAC assessments and questionnaires will be designed to maximise their cross-cultural, cross-national and cross-language validity. All participating countries must adhere to common technical standards when implementing the study. PIAAC will thus provide a firm basis for comparative analysis of skill formation systems and their outcomes and for international benchmarking regarding adult skills.
The background questionnaire will collect information about each person taking part in the PIAAC study.
It will ask about:
This represents an innovative part in PIAAC. Covering only adults in employment. It will use a “job requirement approach” to ask adults about the types and levels of generic skills used in the workplace. These include the use of reading and numeracy skills on the job as well as the mastery of information technology, communication, presentation and team-working skills. It will ask about the requirements of the person main job in terms of the intensity and frequency of the use of such skills.
The purpose of the assessment elements is to measure core adult competencies required in the information age.
Three types of competencies will be measured:
Literacy is the ability to understand and use information from written texts in a variety of contexts to achieve goals and further develop knowledge and potential. This is a core requirement for the development of higher order skills and for positive economic and social outcomes. Previous studies have shown reading literacy to be closely linked to positive outcomes among the workforce, in social participation and in lifelong learning.
The assessment of reading literacy will draw on previous international studies building on the wide range of material introduced by ALL and PIAAC Cycle 1 and allow for trends to be monitored. However, this assessment area will also be refined and extended in new ways.
To provide more detailed information about adults with lower literacy skills, the literacy assessment in this study is complemented by a section of “reading component” skills. Reading skills include a basic set of decoding skills that enable individuals to extract meaning from written texts:
Numeracy is the ability to use, apply, interpret and communicate mathematical information and ideas. It is an essential skill in an age when an individual encounters an increasing amount and wider range of quantitative and mathematical information in their daily lives. Numeracy is a parallel skill to reading literacy. It is important to assess how these competencies interact since they are differently distributed across subgroups of the population.
The assessment of numeracy will draw on the wide range of material introduced by PIAAC Cycle 1. Numeracy items will cover the four broad areas of content that characterise the mathematical demand placed on adults – quality and number; dimension and shape; data, chance and pattern and change.
It refers to the ability to effectively use digital technology, communication tools and networks to acquire and evaluate information, communicate with others to solve problems and accomplish complex tasks. It is not a measurement of “computer literacy”, but rather the cognitive skills required in the information age – an age in which the access is boundless. Information has made it essential for us to be able to work out what information we need, to evaluate it critically and to use it to solve problems. To assess this competency, it is particularly important not just to measure basic proficiency but also to identify higher-order skills – a particular goal of PIAAC overall.
The first PIAAC study focuses specifically on assessing the ability to solve problems using multi-sources on a tablet computer. The second PIAAC study will elaborate on detailed problem-solving assessments including emphasising on information access, evaluation, retrieval and processing. The task will be of varying levels of difficulty both in their cognitive demands and in the technology skills required – with some being easier on one of these criteria, but harder on the other. Of particular interest will be tasks that are demanding from both a technological and cognitive point of view. That will allow to distinguish adults with high literacy according to whether they are able or not to apply their literacy skills in tasks requiring high technological competence.
In order to read effectively, one requires basic skills such as word recognition, decoding skills, vocabulary knowledge and fluency. These are the building blocks of literacy and basic reading component skills. Previous literacy studies have found substantial proportions of the adult population unable to demonstrate adequate levels of skills needed to retrieve and understand written information and apply it to real-life situations. However, previous studies have not been able to distinguish between those who lack basic reading component skills from those who have mastered the mechanics of reading but are not skilled at comprehension.
In PIAAC, adults demonstrating lower literacy levels will be assessed to determine the extent to which they have developed the basic reading component skills. The purpose is not to compare countries in terms of how many adults master these buildings blocks, but rather to help individual countries understand more about those people who are identified as having low literacy levels.
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