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Measuring adult skills in developing countries under the SDGs

Mon, March 6, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Sheraton Atlanta, Floor: 1, Georgia 8 (South Tower)

Proposal

Objectives: Literacy and numeracy continue to be emphasized in the proposed post-2015 sustainable development goals (SDGs). Goal 4.6 of the SDG goals state that: By 2030, ensure that all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy (UIS, 2016). The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) called upon Governments to “develop reliable measures of literacy and generate data that are comparable across time and disaggregated by age, sex, disability, socioeconomic status, geographical location (urban/rural areas) and other relevant factors” . However, there are major challenges in measuring literacy and numeracy and monitoring progress of the literacy and numeracy skills of the adult population. In this paper we will look at the challenges and explore pragmatic options to measure adult literacy and numeracy in the diverse world.

Perspective: The authors’ perspective comes from experience working on adult literacy assessment in developing countries. We rely on partnership, working with country’s counterparts: Ministry of Education, National Statistical Office, adult education specialists, linguists, and international learning and assessment specialists to inform the development of appropriate measurement constructs and approaches that is pragmatic to developing countries context yet allow the construction of comparable scale.

Methods: With the existence of OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and the World Bank’s STEP measurement study that cover high and middle income countries, this paper tries to work out an approach to develop an assessment that could link to existing scale and are applicable to developing countries. The advantage of an assessment linked to PIAAC and STEP is that it offers a validated framework for presenting results. In addition, it also offers the potential for comparison of results between countries and will carry with it all of the existing validity information established in PIAAC. Moreover, results would be comparable with those of other countries using the assessment and with countries participating in PIAAC.

Significance: Measuring the percentage of population in a given age group achieving at least a fixed level of proficiency in functional (a) literacy and (b) numeracy skills requires agreement on what that fixed level of proficiency means.

Another key challenge is having contextualized tasks that are applicable to the adult population in varied country context. Differences in culture, including interpretation of cognitive items varies in important ways across adult population and countries (Maddox, Zumbo, Tay-Lim and Qu, 2015).

Finally, the global variation in skills acquisition is also challenging from a measurement perspective. How best to balance national measurement priorities with the need for global metrics is a critical challenge of the SDG measurement framework.



References
Maddox, B, Zumbo, B, Tay-Lim, B & Qu, D. (2015). An anthropologist among the psychometricians: Assessment events, ethnography, and Differential Item Functioning in the Mongolian Gobi. International Journal of Testing, 15(4). Taylor Francis.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). 2016. “Sustainable Development Data Digest: Measuring the education SDGs: From indicator frameworks to data.” Montreal: UIS. http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Documents/uis-sdg4-digest-2016.PDF

Authors