Access to lifelong learning opportunities has long been discussed in terms of the economic benefits conferred by access to and engagement in further education by members of the labor force, particularly within the global knowledge economy. However, equitable access to lifelong education opportunities, particularly for low-skilled adults in the…

This article explores cross-country patterns in how conditions relating to family background, education, and the labor market are related to literacy and numeracy skills. It seeks to assess whether these patterns are in agreement with models of skills formation as identified in the political economy literature. The novelty of this article resides…

Access to lifelong learning opportunities has long been discussed in terms of the economic benefits conferred by access to and engagement in further education by members of the labor force, particularly within the global knowledge economy. However, equitable access to lifelong education opportunities, particularly for low-skilled adults in the…

We assess the relationship between general literacy skills and health status by analysing data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), an international survey of about 250,000 adults aged 16-65 years conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 2011-15 in 33…

Background: Educational qualifications and literacy skills are highly related. This is not surprising as it is one aim of educational systems to equip individuals with competencies necessary to take part in society. Because of this relationship educational qualifications are often used as a proxy for "human capital". However, from a…

This study uses the PIAAC data to examine the relationships between education system characteristics (e.g. early tracking and vocational education orientation) and distributions of adult numeracy skills. It also investigates the effects of postponing the tracking age and easing university access for students on a vocational track on the average…

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is put forward as a landmark development in the lifelong monitoring and international comparison of education. The first round of PIAAC's Survey of Adult Skills compared performance in literacy, numeracy and…

Ample evidence indicates that a person's human capital is important for success on the labor market in terms of both wages and employment prospects. However, unlike the efforts to identify the impact of school attainment on labor-market outcomes, the literature on returns to cognitive skills has not yet provided convincing evidence that the…

This article examines cross-country variations in adult skills inequality and asks why skills in Anglophone countries are so unequal. Drawing on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's recent Survey of Adult Skills and other surveys, it investigates the differences across countries and country groups in inequality in both…

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the link between age and proficiency in information-processing skills, based on information drawn from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The data reveal significant age-related differences in proficiencies, strongly suggesting that proficiency tends to "naturally" decline with age. Age…

The "Comparative Indicators of Education" report series has been published on a biennial basis since it began in 2002, although this year's is the first to expand its focus to the G-20 countries, having previously been focused on the G-8 countries. "Comparative Indicators of Education in the United States and Other G-20 Countries:…

Illiterate immigrant adults (n=14) in France were assessed on ability to master three metalinguistic tasks: judgment of phonological length of words, initial consonant deletion, and lexical segmentation of sentences. Performance of illiterates and partial illiterates dramatically improved after training which involved corrective feedback and…

An international numeracy scale compared how well adults in seven countries--the United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Australia, and Denmark--handled some basic tasks involving numbers. The questionnaire comprised a set of 12 numeracy tasks that respondents were asked to complete using pen and paper. Within each country, the…

This collection contains 17 papers presented at a seminar on literacy strategies in the community movement, held in Namur, Belgium, in 1991. The following papers are included: "Introduction" (Hautecoeur); "Illiteracy: Direction? Action? Results?" (Hautecoeur); "Basic Education and Personal Development Strategies"…