This study's aim was to understand the relationship of the component skills of reading, such as word recognition, vocabulary, and spelling, to large-scale measures of literacy, such as the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) (Kirsch, Jungleblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993) and the closely related International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS)…

This research brief highlights key findings from a study that is a subset of a larger study being conducted jointly by NCSALL's John Strucker and Kentaro Yamamoto and Irwin Kirsch of the Educational Testing Service (ETS). This study builds on the proposition that a reader's comprehension performance is largely determined by his or her abilities in…

This monograph focuses on the literacy performance of U.S. adults in comparison to adults in other high-income countries, underscoring the fact that the overall U.S. performance is mediocre at best and that the U.S. is a world leader in the degree of inequality between the best and poorest performers. The monograph describes the National and the…

In response to the assertion that reading is a fixed set of processes that can be identified and studied independently of context, a study was initiated based on the following assumptions: that different types of reading (prose comprehension and text search) can be identified and measured, that reading competencies are highly associated with uses…