• 'low literacy' despite advanced capitalism

 

It's common knowledge that literacy rates are highly correlated with  democracy, freedom, health, life expectancy - in short with development.

 

But its probably not so well known that in the developed world many people achieve only an inadequte form of literacy - dubbed "lower literacy" .

 

Lower literacy is different than illiteracy: people with lower literacy can read, but they have difficulties doing so.

 

According to an article I read today, 48% of the US population has low literacy!  (And the situation is similar in the other advanced capitalist countries.)

 

I came across this statistic in Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for March 14  (which cited the 1992  U.S. Department of Education's National Adult Literacy Survey  as its source.) 

 

Here are some exerpts from Nielson's article (he's writing about web usability, so his examples refer to web pages):

 

 

Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view.

 

Lower literacy is different than illiteracy: people with lower literacy can read, but they have difficulties doing so.

 

The most notable difference between lower- and higher-literacy users is that lower-literacy users can't understand a text by glancing at it. They must read word for word and often spend considerable time trying to understand multi-syllabic words.

 

Lower-literacy users focus exclusively on each word and slowly move their eyes across each line of text. In other words, they "plow" the text, line by line. This gives them a narrow field of view and they therefore miss objects outside the main flow of the text they're reading.

 

Unlike higher-literacy users, lower-literacy users don't scan text. As a result, for example, they can't quickly glance at a list of navigation options to select the one they want. They must read each word in each option carefully. Their only other choice is to completely skip over large amounts of information, which they often do when things become too complicated.

 

Lower-literacy users tend to satisfice -- accept something as "good enough" -- based on very little information because digging deeper requires too much reading, which is both challenging and time consuming. As soon as text becomes too dense, lower-literacy users start skipping, usually looking for the next link. In doing so, they often overlook important information.

 

I don't see this is a sign that things have 'gone backwards' due to some sort of mass "dumbing down". Not so long ago most people left school at age 14 or 15  whereas nowadays (in the advanced capitalist countries)  the majority complete high school and large numbers go on to receive some form of tertiary education or training.

 

However the fact that almost half the population achieves only a restricted  form of literacy is quite shocking.   We know that slaves were generally forbidden to learn to read and that achieving literacy was seen as  vital to becoming fully free.  Obviously the industrial revolution and bourgeois democracy  opened the way for mass literacy - indeed it required mass literacy.  

 

However it hasn't gone on to  produce a population in which the majority are highly literate.  This is a  striking example of the way in which it  cramps development and holds things back.   

 

i was one of those 33% +prolies who left school in 1947 without being able read or write my own address & as a semi skilled worker over next 40 years it's been my experience that nothing much as changed for prolies at the bottom & then to read on a non "psuedo-left" interlectual blogsite, that you find this info quite shocking. i'd doubt marx wud give good marx. jim

Hi Jim,

If you left school in 1947 then you're a lot older than me so your schooling experiences would have been very different.  

 

From what I've been told there were only  3 or 4 state secondary schools at that time and the vast majority of kids attended primary schools that went up to grade 8.  Only a tiny handful of kids had any schooling beyond grade 8.

 

Am I right about this?  I'd be interested in knowing more about how things were then  if you've got time to write about it. 

 

And also, you obviously did learn to read and write after leaving school.   How did you achieve this?  

 

 

One thing I've been noticing a lot lately is  that people don't  tend  to  have much sense of history - of how the present is different from the past and the direction in which things are changing. 

 

 

keza

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

keza wrote:

According to an article I read today, 48% of the US population has low literacy!  (And the situation is similar in the other advanced capitalist countries.)

I agree it's alarming but I don't like it when surveys pretend they are measuring things accurately and scientifically (48% not 47% or 49%) when they are not. The link on Nielson's site to the original source is now broken but the Nielson article makes it clear that he is talking writing about reading words, for example:

The most notable difference between lower- and higher-literacy users is that lower-literacy users can't understand a text by glancing at it. They must read word for word and often spend considerable time trying to understand multi-syllabic words

OK. I'm horrified too when young people can't and / or won't read - and I'm sure they're disadvantaged by it - but with all the changes in multimedia delivery of information we need to look afresh about how we define and talk about literacy.

Say , we were measuring the literacy of being able to play a MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game) like Counter Strike, Everquest or World of Warcraft. Some of the low literacy people that Nielson is talking about would wipe the floor with him in that medium.

What's my point?

That there is a whole range of domains of literacy some of which involved lots of reading and writing and others of which don't involve very much at all. That reading and writing are very important but it's no longer adequate to talk about literacy in that narrow sense when things have proliferated so much.

One of the problems at schools is that the ageing teacher workforce places more importance on the narrow definition of literacy (reading and writing) while the students feel bored and want to play with their mobile phones or go to town and play video games.

Literacy is a moving target. I see the need for a dialogue between teachers and students about which literacies are meaningful to them before we can claim to measure things to the nearest percentage point.

Sorry, didn't get time to put in a picture

Bill wrote:

Literacy is a moving target. I see the need for a dialogue between teachers and students about which literacies are meaningful to them before we can claim to measure things to the nearest percentage point.

 
I agree up to to a point with what Bill said - ie I agree that people growing up today are extremely competent in domains that many older people struggle to cope with.  Also,  I certainly didn't intend to suggest that things have got worse - that in the mythical  "good old days" the population as a whole was more literate.  My point was more that the rate of high level literacy just isn't good enough and that this is an indictment on capitalism. 



The most important link that  I put in my original post does still work. It will take you to the National Center  for Educational Statistics and on that page you will find a lot of links to information about how levels of literacy were/are defined and  measured, sample sizes, data analysis and so on.



I don't think the findings are invalidated because they didn't cover other skills - unless we are redefining the meaning of the word "literacy" to mean something other than the  dictionary definition which is:  "ability to read and write".  


I know that it's quite common nowadays  to talk of "literacy" as though it simply means being skilled in some domain of knowledge eg "scientific literacy",  but that is a very loose use of the word.  IMO its not really reasonable to criticise research into levels of literacy on the grounds that they only looked at reading and writing ability!



The research conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics gave the following overview of its definition of literacy:

Overview

The 1992 and 2003 National Assessments of Adult Literacy use the following definition of literacy:

using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.

This definition goes beyond simply decoding and comprehending text to include a broad range of information-processing skills that adults use in accomplishing the range of tasks associated with work, home, and community contexts.

This definition has been generally accepted by the policy community. For example, the U.S. Congress incorporated a similar definition into the National Literacy Act of 1991, in which literacy was defined as "an individual's ability to read, write, and speak in English and compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job and in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential."

Literacy is neither a single skill suited to all types of texts, nor an infinite number of skills, each associated with a given type of text or document.

The National Adult Literacy Survey measured literacy along three dimensions, prose literacy, document literacy, and quantitative literacy, designed to capture an ordered set of information-processing skills and strategies that adults use to accomplish a diverse range of literacy tasks. The literacy scales make it possible to profile the various types and levels of literacy among different subgroups in our society.

Each scale was divided into five levels that reflect the progression of information-processing skills and strategies: Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, and Level 5. These levels were determined not as a result of any statistical property of the scales, but rather as a result of shifts in the skills and strategies required to succeed on various tasks along the scales, from simple to complex.