This article explores the framing of youth and adult education (YAE) policies in two Latin American countries, namely Chile and Peru. It takes their participation in PIAAC as a contextual starting point to unravel the problems explicitly or implicitly framed in YAE policies and their root causes, as understood by key policy stakeholders. We found…

Occupational mismatch is a highly debated phenomenon in developed countries, but rarely addressed in developing economies. This study investigates the magnitudes of overeducation and overskilling in four Latin American countries in which tertiary education has expanded rapidly (i.e. Chile, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru). Using objective and subjective…

Internationally representative data of middle-aged adults 45 - 65 years old [n(United States) = 2,150; n(Japan) = 2,318; n(South Korea) = 2,800] from the 2012 Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies were analyzed to examine the roles of education and literacy in relation to the digital divide. Results from survey-weighted binary…

The purpose of this study was to conduct national and cross-country analyses to provide insights about educator cognitive skills in literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving within Canada and across nineteen countries using the PIAAC data. MANOVA results of profession differences within Canada demonstrated that educators outperformed other…

We explore the cognitive skill gap between the adult population in Spain and in the rest of European Union countries using the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. We find that differences in schooling account for about a third of the average difference in cognitive test scores, whereas differences in socioeconomic…

The role of international governmental organisations (IGOs) in global policymaking has received significant attention in the field of adult learning and education (ALE) in the twenty-first century, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was recognised as one of the most influential IGO due to its skill surveys --…

We investigated whether andragogical assumptions and their common critiques are reflected in global PIAAC data using its motivation-to-learn (MtL) and elaboration scales. A preliminary validation study with 300 adults revealed that andragogical assumptions cluster on these scales' two factors. Using hierarchical linear modelling of PIAAC data, we…

This article analyses comparative data from the 1994-1998 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the 2012 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). At the micro level, the author considers factors involved in the development of an individual person's literacy from a lifecycle perspective. At the macro level,…

The 'Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies' (PIAAC), developed and managed by the OECD, is an important source of knowledge about adult skills as well as an intervention in the field of education policy. One level of the intervention is the presence of PIAAC results in public media and debate. This article presents a…

Computerized assessments and interactive simulation tasks are increasingly popular and afford the collection of process data, i.e., an examinee's sequence of actions (e.g., clickstreams, keystrokes) that arises from interactions with each task. Action sequence data contain rich information on the problem-solving process but are in a nonstandard,…

We examine if the OECD survey of adult skills, PIAAC, can provide information about the relative quality of education and training in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. We find that the average population scores are inappropriate while the mean scores of natives well approximate the skills of individuals that had the chance to attend the…

This article demonstrates that foreign-born adults in Europe tend to participate less in adult education activities compared to native-born adults living in the same country. However, this is mainly explained through the job-related nature of nonformal education. Foreign-born adults tend to participate more in formal adult education than…

Drawing on the PIAAC data, in this paper I examine how motivational factors such as motivation to learn and grit are related to low-numerate adults' employment status and their actual participation in lifelong learning in Germany, the United States and South Korea. In particular, the study uses PIAAC self-reported data on the degree to which the…

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to replicate the IALS-based analysis by Coulombe, Tremblay and Marchand (2004) as well as Coulombe and Tremblay (2006) based on more recent and more comprehensive data on the literacy skills of the adult population. Results from panel estimations over the period 1970-2010…

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the effect of different educational orientations at the upper-secondary level on labour market outcomes across European countries. The study separates safety net effect and the diversion effect of Vocational Education and Training (VET). Using PIAAC data, we show cross-national differences in the early…