Nearly half of adult Canadians struggle with literacy | Hacker News Reader

Nearly half of adult Canadians struggle with literacy

cbc.ca

> Nearly half of adult Canadians struggle with literacy — and that's bad for the economy

Sad that this be couched in monetary terms in order to seem "relevant." As with so many other things, there is a massive qualitative benefit to reading regardless of it's obvious utilitarian or financial advantages.

This persistent kind of framing in media is quite possibly a second order effect of the Neoliberal consensus. Markets become the primary tool of societal organisation, and institutions are bent and dented into an orientation toward the economic value system.

> Markets become the primary tool of societal organisation

Another way to frame that is people buying what they want and people making and selling what other people want.

Sounds good to me!

It's not that that's bad. It's that if everything is viewed only though this particular lens, a wide range of human experience is lost.

> a wide range of human experience is lost

What is the most important human experience that is lost by markets?

85% of all animal life, receding glaciers, acidified, deadened oceans, plastic bag islands the size of Texas, depleted drinking water, dwindling natural resources, global uncontrolled rise of temperature, soil erosion, anti-microbial resistance, pandemics, factory farming animal abuse, forest fires, nuclear waste, asbestos in the lungs, lead in the veins, mercury in the nerves, global obesity...

ETA: looks like you edited your comment. The original (and rather tone deaf) comment was: "I'm curious what is lost by people doing what they want to do."

I edited it to make it easier to answer.

Your examples are not examples of a properly set up market system. They are spinning off what are called "externalities", which are costs not born by either the buyer or the seller. A properly set up market would apply those costs to the producer.

An example of this is CO2 emission should be taxed, not regulated.

Ah, indeed, no true scotsman would pollute the planet, don't be daft!

We are not blessed to be living in a perfect world that can be set up for an ideal market system. For the last four decades, these externalities have gotten ramped up to fever pitch. I'm interested in your take on how, in this world, we get to a point where ALL of the above consequences can be forestalled through HN's favourite hard-on: deregulation and market forces run amok.

I have no idea how you're going to accomplish this with centralized economic planning, but there's a much better shot at it with a free market approach.

Basically, taxing the externalities is the market based solution. Banning is a ham-fisted inefficient method.

How would price discovery operate on externalities? Who decides what's an externality? It seems like you're suggesting centralized planning under a different name.

The government decides what is an externality and determines the tax rate.

Two things governments are good at: taxing, and starting wars. Why not take advantage of the first?

It even has the advantage of being a revenue source for the government, rather than a revenue sink. The government has to tax something, why not externalities?

Around here, the government decided to tax plastic shopping bags. Geez, just put a tax on it instead. Raise the tax until plastic shopping bags become scarce enough. Then if someone really wants a plastic shopping bag to use, say, to clean up after their dog, they can if they're willing to pay. Much better than being charged with a crime.

Introducing taxes on externalities is a form of central planning. And I agree that it's a very valuable tool. (Regulation is a very valuable tool as well. Which one works better depends on the particular situation, e.g. regulation is superior when levying the tax is difficult in the real world.)

Also, many people will argue that if a market is subject to such taxes, then it is no longer a free market. Perhaps you're not one of them and would consider such people misguided ideologues (we'd agree on that). However, the existence of such participants in the discussion needs to be acknowledged, and it very quickly feels like you're pointless talking about semantics.

> Also, many people will argue that if a market is subject to such taxes, then it is no longer a free market.

Well, yeah.

“Free market” doesn't mean “free of regulation of which I personally disapprove”. If government has a thumb on the scale deliberately skewing outcomes, it's not a free market.

> Perhaps you're not one of them and would consider such people misguided ideologues

What does ideology have to do with that? One can oppose l’aissez faire capitalism (which Info, heartily) and recognize that Pigovian taxes are contrary to it.

> Introducing taxes on externalities is a form of central planning.

It isn't considered that by economists. It's a means of internalizing the externalities, not deciding what, when, how and by whom to provide goods and services.

> many people will argue that if a market is subject to such taxes, then it is no longer a free market.

They're wrong. Externalities are pushing costs onto other people without their consent, which is not free market.

Maybe we're just getting hung up on the word "free". Some people like to use it and so it slips into the discussion easily, but usually it distracts more than it adds to the discussion.

Every market has rules, and the term "free market" tends to degenerate into "market with rules that I happen to like", which isn't particularly useful.

Same for the "central planning" thing. It's always a matter of degree.

> I have no idea how you're going to accomplish this with centralized economic planning, but there's a much better shot at it with a free market approach.

1989 called, they want their dichotomies back.

Markets are a means not an ends. Putting 'markets' first is a way of hiding your morally objectionable ends behind a "someone paid me to do it so it must be good" argument.

Free markets come with the stipulation that Bob trading with Carol does not hurt uninvolved Ted.

Bob knows Carol has a drug addiction. He sells Carol crack cocaine anyway. He has no guilt because the existence of a market for drugs means its ok, after all, Ted isn't harmed until Carol steals his tv to buy more crack.

People are not machines, we are members of a community and just because someone will pay you to do something doesn't mean you should.

In a free market, you can decline to sell to Carol.

In any case, the example is not compelling. It seems that making drugs illegal exacerbates the crime problems associated with drugs. It doesn't fix things. The War on Drugs is a near total failure.

My example illustrates pro-social incentives that are not captured by the profit motive.

> > a wide range of human experience is lost

> What is the most important human experience that is lost by markets?

This is still the wrong way to look at it IMO. It's not that markets lose or destroy human experience, it's that it gets lost when we organize our society only via markets.

It's also a bit of a silly question because everybody will have a different answer depending on their personal moral and value system, but generally it will be things that are not easily priced.

Sticking with the theme of literacy of the overall discussion here, poetry comes to mind.

Poetry has notoriously low market value, and really poems are almost inherently not a good to be traded on a market. They are rooted in an oral tradition of poems being shared in social settings. At least in my personal experience, this is still largely the case. And yet many (obviously not all) people value poetry to some extent, perhaps because there are some poems they find beautiful, or they tickle the brain in just the right way.

But again, poetry is just one example and I'm not even saying that it's the most important one, it's just that they fit particularly well into the larger discussion here.

I have no idea how poetry gets lost in a market system. There is nothing whatsoever stopping you from writing poetry and sharing it as you wish in a free market.

> not a good to be traded on a market

Sure it is. Mostly in the form of music lyrics, but also people make and sell poetry books all the time.

> And yet many (obviously not all) people value poetry to some extent

I don't know anyone who doesn't like poetry in the form of a song. People still sing along in social settings, too, like concerts, church services and birthday parties.

> It's also a bit of a silly question

Not at all. I would expect someone posing the theory to at least have something at the top of their mind they're regarding as a problem example. For you it's poetry, and I showed that poetry isn't suffering in the least under the yoke of a market system.

> I have no idea how poetry gets lost in a market system. There is nothing whatsoever stopping you from writing poetry and sharing it as you wish in a free market.

Right, but people end up writing and sharing poetry despite the market, not because of it. Poets tend to be rather poor, they aren't incentivized by money.

If we organized our society in a way where money and markets were the only incentives, then poetry would be lost.

That's what I keep repeating in the hope that maybe it will sink in eventually: It's not that markets actively destroy things like poetry. It's that markets don't help those things thrive despite people valuing them highly (which can of course lead to destruction indirectly by crowding out, but that's a separate point).

This is because the correlation between what people value and what ends up having monetary value is too weak.[0] In theory one could try to fix that, but that has never worked in practice and there are good reasons why it never will. Trying to make it so is the same type of folly as trying to implement pure communism: it doesn't take human nature into account.[1]

[0] As was also observed in a sibling thread where the discussion went to pricing externalities.

[1] For what it's worth, this is a very common criticism of traditional microeconomics, i.e. humans really don't "work" in the way that traditional microeconomics says they do. The theory is built on a broken foundation. This is actually really well known among economists and why subfields like behavioural economics exist. For some reason this knowledge just doesn't percolate to the wider public.

Meanwhile in reality it also entails people being manipulated into wanting something and people making and selling what no one needs.

What things are you manipulated into wanting that you don't want, and what do you buy that you don't need?

Why are you doing those things?

Much like nearly half of adult Canadians, you seem to struggle with literacy.

And are you really going to pretend that manipulative marketing isn't a thing? Wow.

Rather than insult me, perhaps answering my question would more effectively make your point?

Oh, I didn't insult you. And you'll see that your questions were quite off the mark if you actually read my original comment.

But I'll gladly make my point once more: manipulative marketing is a thing.

Your point has no value without an example.

The anti-aging industry in its entirety, for starters. The vast majority of alternative medicine. The fashion industry is manipulative, the list goes on. Advertising is almost always manipulative -- tailored ads all the more. The ways in which consumers are manipulated are as innovative as they are plentiful: https://news.wsu.edu/2012/11/26/wsu-researchers-tie-simple-s....

And you're either plain ignorant or blinded by ideology if you really needed all those examples.

That's a sycophantic way of framing market-dominated thinking, yes, but as other users have pointed out, market thinking having _primacy_ in society has downsides. Large downsides, in my opinion.

Markets are a tool in service of humanity, but market dominated thinking abounds and we get this tweeted with a straight face by think-tank people:

> I still believe in markets. Markets do not fail us. We fail markets.

1. https://twitter.com/AmityShlaes/status/1315793783951327234

Edit: I thought I recognised your username, and bet that you're the most upvoted user that's replied to me on this site. If you've written about your time on this site and how you got started on it, I'd be interested to read it.

For a topical example, take the covid vaccine distribution system. It is done by the government, and has fared poorly in the US and Europe. The excuses are variations on "the states don't know how to set up a distribution system".

But we already have a distribution system for vaccines. Where did you get your last flu shot? The local drug store, a market based system. I see the government busy trying to reproduce overnight an efficient, working system that's already there sitting idle. Of course they'll fail.

I phoned my local drug store and asked if I can make an appointment for a covid vaccination. They replied they have no idea when or if they'd ever get any vaccination supply. Meanwhile, the state says they have a severe lack of people who can give vaccinations. (I know where they are hiding, they're behind the counter at your local pharmacy.)

The solution is simple and stupidly obvious. Distribute vaccines to the zillion pharmacies, and pay them per vaccination in arm. They're not going to waste any time vaccinating people.

There's a lot of truth in this, but one catch is that the "zillion pharmacies" aren't set up for -70C storage. Although delivering each of them a small box of vaccine to be injected that same day sounds like a problem for which we also have well-established solutions... they're just busy delivering hamburgers.

Dry ice is -78C and is routinely used for shipping. Amazon is good at shipping me my orders in one day, I doubt they'd have any problem shipping daily boxes of vaccines to every pharmacy in the country.

I seriously do not see why the wheel has to be reinvented here.

Dry ice is indeed routine, but I think usually used to ship things which need to stay below -10C, not below -60C. So there has been some work in figuring out better shipping boxes, tracking devices, procedures for breaking down large shipments at the airport, etc. But the layer of guys driving trucks around town is of course the same.

I'd just call up Jeff Bezos and let him figure it out. He's the best guy in the world at effective and efficient distribution.

> take the covid vaccine distribution system. It is done by the government, and has fared poorly in the US and Europe.

I live in the UK. I compare the vaccination distribution (run by the NHS and Public Health) and the Test and Trace system (contracted out at huge expense) and I see that private provision fucked it up.

For vaccination we've don over 5% of the population, over 4 million people, have received at least one dose and it's working well although there is tension between vaccinating the most at risk (old people and people living in poverty) vs people at lower risk.

For test and trace, well, read this: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/906/covid19-test-track...

---begin quote---

Contracts worth £7 billion have been signed with 217 public and private organisations to provide supplies, services and infrastructure, including test laboratories and call handlers for tracing. NHST&T has plans to sign a further 154 contracts, worth £16.2 billion, by March 2021. In total, 70% of early contracts by value were directly awarded without competition under emergency measures that were in use across government.

International comparisons show that outsourcing is a part of many testing systems but is unusual for tracing. A range of stakeholders have queried why the government did not involve local authorities more in its initial approach to tracing, given their previous experience in this area. The government did not document with a business case the basis for the delivery model it initially chose until September.

A target to provide results within 24 hours of in-person testing in the community has not been met. Turnaround within 24 hours peaked in June at 93% but subsequently deteriorated to reach a low of 14% in mid-October before rising to 38% in early November.

NHST&T did not plan for the sharp rise in testing demand in September when schools and universities reopened. Laboratories processing community swab tests were unable to keep pace with the volume of tests and experienced large backlogs, which meant NHST&T had to limit the number of tests available and commission extra help from other laboratories. Rationing of tests meant some people were told to visit test sites hundreds of miles away.

It is important to get hold of people with COVID-19 or who might have been exposed to it quickly so they can self-isolate, but the service saw increases in the time taken to reach people between May and mid-October, before improvements in the last two weeks of October.

At times, parts of the national tracing service have barely been used: in May, DHSC signed contracts for the provision of 3,000 health professionals and 18,000 call handlers. The call handler contracts were worth up to £720 million. By 17 June, the utilisation rate (the proportion of time that someone actively worked during their paid hours) was low for both health professional (4%) and call handler staff (1%), indicating that they had little work to do. This means substantial public resources have been spent on staff who provided minimal services in return.

National and local government have tried to increase public engagement with tracing, but surveys suggest that the proportion of contacts fully complying with requests to self-isolate might range from 10% to 59%. NHST&T acknowledges that non-compliance poses a key risk to its success and has taken steps to increase levels of self-isolation, for example by making follow-up calls to people while they are self-isolating. For as long as compliance is low, the cost-effectiveness of NHST&T’s activities will inevitably be in doubt.

Yes this is an interesting contrast. But besides public/private, it's also about delivering some concrete physical thing, vs. some virtual service. At least for the tracing part, I mean... a massive call-center roll-out just seems obviously prone to going badly wrong, a bit like huge IT projects. Especially given how uncertain the total demand for it was.

Whereas for vaccination the goal is clearer & easier to track. Which is not to say that you can't mess it up, of course, witness almost every other country.

There also is a distribution and vaccination system already in place, it's just that for some reason the government wants to reinvent one from scratch.

In the UK, presumably the NHS is precisely the "distribution and vaccination system already in place", which the government re-used?

Although I don't actually know whether they handle the flu vaccine, or if this is something you get at private pharmacies instead.

Here in Norway as of today we have distributed 65 k doses and administered 48 k firstly to the elderly who are in care homes, then to the over 75s in ad-hoc vaccination centres. That's 0.91% of the population vaccinated so far (first dose). There aren't many more doses available so distributing them to pharmacies would not accelerate the process very much if at all. The rate at which the vaccines are being administered is getting faster all the time. Once the vaccine starts arriving in the country in greater quantities they will start distributing them to local doctors.

As for making an appointment; here in Norway people will be notified by the local authority when they can get it. Doses are being dealt out in age groups, oldest first plus those especially at risk.

The relevant metric is the ratio of doses the government has on hand vs the the number administered.

Here in WA state, only one third of the doses delivered have been administered.

Heck, Amazon is headquartered here. If I was the governor, I'd have gotten Jeff Bezos on the horn 6 weeks ago with "halp!" I bet Amazon would love to help out, they'd make some money and it'd be great PR.

Looks like Amazon is taking the lead!

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-vaccine/amazon...

> n WA state, only one third of the doses delivered have been administered.

Good grief! Norway is slower than neighbouring countries because we have a decentralised health system because we have such a scattered population and the health service has decided to use the existing infrastructure rather than try to create a new more centralised system on the fly. In addition a substantial fraction of the doses are held back to ensure that all those who have had one dose will get the second within a reasonable time.

The average is about half of the distributed doses have been administered

But pretty much all European health systems are performing faster than your example and they are pretty much all using the existing public health system. At least here, Norway, there seems to be no evidence that involving private actors would do any better. In the UK they have vaccinated (first dose) 8.5% of the population just using the NHS. The US doesn't seem that far behind on average with 5.7%. Norway is 1.4%

And also surely adding more organizations to the existing system risks running into a version of Brook's law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

It obliterates a wide range of social settings, though. Running things in the community, often at a voluntary level that meant more investment locally, gave people a chance to meet and be involved. In the UK those spaces have been disappearing for generations.

> It obliterates a wide range of social settings, though.

What is the most important social setting that markets obliterate?

It is hard to pick one, really. But in the UK we squashed the following in the 1980s:

Friendly societies (a type of customer owned insurer) Building societies (which used to be local, but are now essentially national scale banks) Various types of sports and social clubs (which often put on entertainment but also hosted lots of recreational activities)

There is more, too, but these things got in the way of the financialised, neoliberal world that was under construction. What happened was policies then allowed them to change unrecognisably or just atrophy away to nothing. They all represented ways of being involved in the running of your community. Most are now irrelevant or gone.

They're gone simply because people found little reason to keep them. They've been replaced by social things HN where you and I are having a nice discussion. (Too bad it doesn't involve hefting a pint, sigh.) That wouldn't have happened in the 80's, when I communicated with Zortech in London with a daily fax.

Sure, but most people haven't seen replacements for these things. Most of the discontent I see in politics comes from turning it into a spectator sport, rather than a way of describing the process of communities choosing things through the old organs of social democracy.

But yes, there are new things and they are good. The internet pretty much raised me as a teenager.

RE: pints, think I'd trade a finger for a pint with some good company at the moment. Alas.

The lockdowns would be far, far worse without the internet to connect with others.

I, too, miss hefting a pint with my friends. Sigh.

While that's true, that's just the headline. The article is pretty good, and touches not just on individuals but effects on democracy for example.

I think the problem is wider. In Poland average Pole doesn't read even one book a year. I don't think we can keep having modern society if most of the people do not read.

You don't need to read books to be literate. You can read magazines, newspapers (paper or electronic), if you look on such statistics [1] then, well, numbers are different.

Here Poland is on the 3rd place in Europe in terms of time spent on reading - I think this includes not only books, not sure, as this article is a typical XXI century click-bait journalism that does not provide any substantial details about the subject.

Besides, the good question is, what is more valuable and mind opening: reading stupid book or watch a good documentary on TV or some scientific channel on YouTube. It is 2021, times has changed, we have more media of idea exchange.

Reading books is no longer such a good measure of ones "intellectual development".

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/05/chart-of-the-day-wher...

>You don't need to read books to be literate. You can read magazines, newspapers (paper or electronic)

Where, even in the best, you'll find 1/10th the substance you'll find in the best of books, packaged in vacuous snippets for quick consumption, and written to gather advertising...

The person who wont read any of the classic books (be it science, non-fiction, literature, history, etc.) but will still read magazines and newspapers, I'll still call illiterate - even if the magazine was the Economist or the National Geographic, and not Men's Health and Cosmopolitan (which more often than not, is).

Surely being literate is simply being able to read and write coherently? Whether you read books, the Economist, academic papers, Hacker News, or whatever, I don't see how it matters.

Does it include "reading comprehension"? I understand being able to read and write, but understanding what you're reading should be part of it I think.

And I don't mean "deep thought" level critique and understanding. More like following a paragraph and understanding what is being said.

> Does it include "reading comprehension"?

"Literacy"? Not really. AFAIK, there's the "functional literacy" term for that.

What good is literaracy (alone) without reading comprehension?

Being able to read road signs and the like?

I'd say that there can be degrees of reading comprehension, and I tend to view functional illiteracy as literacy attrition, kind of secondary illiteracy. I guess it's useful to distinguish it from strict illiteracy (somebody not having learned how to read in the first place), as it requires a different kind of treatment, even if the symptoms of both are similar.

>Surely being literate is simply being able to read and write coherently?

In an idiocracy, it doesn't.

Literacy meant more than simple being able to read and write on a technical level. (Not that most people not reading "even a book a year" can read and write coherently or "read the Economist" otherwise).

While I believe I'm sympathetic to you, I think the hang up people have is in your use of the word "literacy." I think most people wouldn't call people who can read a news article illiterate.

I do agree it would be better if people read more actual books but this seems like a degree of literacy issue while illiterate tends to mean "completely unable to read."

It's usually called 'functional illiteracy'.

If you can read the words in an article, but don't understand what it says, should you really be considered literate?

Understanding what it says is not understanding the meanings of separate words, but the meaning of the text in question.

Sure but even that's a bit of a distance from what they're arguing. I can imagine that someone can totally not read a book every year but still understand context of say a news article they've read. That is nowhere near functional illiteracy.

Where, even in the best, you'll find 1/10th the substance you'll find in the best of books

That's assuming people read the best books.

Let's not forget that Fifty Shades of Grey was the best selling book of the decade (in the US):

https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/20...

>That's assuming people read the best books.

Not doing that would still make them illiterate in some degree.

But even with mediocre books, at least they wouldn't be reading the attention-killing dopamine chasing snippets of BS on most online websites.

Do it sound like these "don't read even a book per year" people read The Well or LessWrong or something of the sort online?

You don't have to read books at all, and many people who do score poorly on literacy tests.

It's not your ability to read words that is relevant, but your ability to understand contexts and meanings.

> Do it sound like these "don't read even a book per year" people read The Well or LessWrong or something of the sort online?

Your reading preferences are not the gold standard in what makes a good book or makes one "literate". The same applies to every other single individual.

At the same time the internet obviously doesn't only contain "dopamine chasing snippets of BS". Online discussions and articles can improve critical thinking or make someone think deeper about their views and motivation just like literature can. Yet you deny that by bluntly saying all people reading no books are illiterate.

As a side note, before you start gatekeeping literacy you may want to avoid grammar mistakes in your own writing. Though it will not make your point come across less elitist, unfortunately.

>Your reading preferences are not the gold standard in what makes a good book or makes one "literate"

Yes, but those were just examples, not meant to pinpoint the golden standard but to illustrate the point.

>The same applies to every other single individual.

Yes, but it shouldn't apply to a collective cultural consensus.

Of course in this era nothing can be said to be of a higher standard, and everything cultural is subjective, lest one offends the high priests of mass culture and their "individual (consumer) is king" religion. So feel free to downvote, like other cultures and eras would have felt free to upvote.

>As a side note, before you start gatekeeping literacy you may want to avoid grammar mistakes in your own writing.

Ah, the ad hominem attack that has nothing to do with the substance of the argument.

Never mind that I'm not a native speaker, and I would like to see how you would have fared in my language :-)

> Ah, the ad hominem attack that has nothing to do with the substance of the argument.

If you judge others based on what they read you better meet your own standards, that's all I'm saying.

> Never mind that I'm not a native speaker

Me neither. Even though according to your statements in previous comments I'm illiterate.

>If you judge others based on what they read you better meet your own standards, that's all I'm saying.

I don't judge any particular person, much less one I'm involved in argument with, for that to be an ad-hominen.

I also don't abstracty judge people in general/in toto (e.g. morally, or in some such capacity) I judge their literacy/culture etc.

For this purpose, "what you read" has historically been even better than a mere correlation / proxy (being "well read" having been an essential attribute of culture).

blogs of strong people, forums tend to be good too

I agree that you do not need to read books, but books are a good proxy for demanding content. If I count articles, the short texts from some gossip portal are valued as much as Harvard Business Review, science journal or whatever else, but their value is wildly different. Same goes for books by the way, but effort to finish a book is much higher.

I also do not believe reading time stats, as people are not that good on self reporting, especially without hard criteria.

The problem is that if you do not read demanding content, your ability to comprehend gets smaller. We made a society that you can live in without much intellectual struggle, but the question is whether we can keep having that society if we permanently cease to pursue intellectual interests.

But how much they read on the black mirror they hold in their hands every day. A good discussion on HN is probably a novella size.

In the US, teachers sometimes count graphic novels (comic books) as reading material, especially for “read-this-many-books-this-week” homework assignments.

There are so many entertaining distractions that just being able to get kids used to reading something is an achievement in of itself.

It's great they linked that actual data, to often the media does not do this.

And it seems like Canada is exactly the same as the OECD?

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-555-x/2013001/t/tbl1....

I don't feel like "Nearly half of adult Canadians struggle with literacy" is justified.

51% at level 3:

> Texts at this level are often dense or lengthy, and include continuous, non-continuous, mixed, or multiple pages of text. Understanding text and rhetorical structures become more central to successfully completing tasks, especially navigating of complex digital texts. Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information, and often require varying levels of inference. Many tasks require the respondent to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. Often tasks also demand that the respondent disregard irrelevant or inappropriate content to answer accurately. Competing information is often present, but it is not more prominent than the correct information.

Falling short of level 4:

> Tasks at this level often require respondents to perform multiple-step operations to integrate, interpret, or synthesize information from complex or lengthy continuous, non-continuous, mixed, or multiple type texts. Complex inferences and application of background knowledge may be needed to perform successfully. Many tasks require identifying and understanding one or more specific, non-central ideas in the text in order to interpret or evaluate subtle evidence-claim or persuasive discourse relationships. Conditional information is frequently present in tasks at this level and must be taken into consideration by the respondent. Competing information is present and sometimes seemingly as prominent as correct information.

> United States 34.2% of adults scored at Level 3 and 11.5% of adults scored at Level 4/5.

Whereas 51% Canadians are at Level 3.

> Poor reading, writing and numeracy skills in adults make up a literacy gap... the gap is due in part to an abundance of jobs in the past that do not require the daily use of reading comprehension and information synthesis skills.

The problem is identifying children with learning disabilities and/or low IQ early enough and steering them into effective programs tailored to core literacy/numeracy. This is a non-trivial problem in rural and remote communities.

Our disdain of IQ style tests, assumed to be associated with marginalization, has probably backfired. The key question is what level of literacy/numeracy is expected for a given IQ and then identifying individuals that fall below this range of expectations. If you don’t recognize the natural distribution to begin with it is hard to improve outcomes.

A second problem not addressed in the article is individuals with above average IQs that are functionally innumerate and lack "information synthesis skills”. Journalists generally fall into this category. We need quality information filters especially during a pandemic.

I think you need to look at different ways on how we consume information these days. Books, yes, but what about Netflix documentaries, Youtube, Science blogs, etc. We live in a modern informational era, full of opportunities to consume relevant and educational information.

Yes, it's very dependent on the content. When I read books a lot it was almost 100% novels. Great entertainment value and great to learn reading in a motivating way, but that didn't give me nearly as much inspiration and impulses for thinking critically as useful content on the internet(which is another kind of literacy). Some people enjoy reading great literature and interpreting it, others like it in a different format and that's fine too.

Does anyone have examples of the tests used? Reading the description I can see why only 1% are expected to perform at a top level - just interested in the actual

Website is at https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/

https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/piaacdesign/ has a few sample items.

Right off the bat the very first question is ambiguous. The very first sentence states that children must be there at 9am, but then later says that breakfast is at 7.30. I mean who would give such instructions? Half of the people wants breakfast and other half breakfasts at home.

That's why they ask for the latest time??? Presumably if some parents cook their kids breakfast and thus would want to bring their kids in later since they would spend some of that time cooking + eating, they can but the kids should be there by the time that the instructions explicitly say should be there?

If anything, it is a good test question precisely because it asks for a nuance that could confuse unless the reader actually understands what they read and what question was asked of them.

But this is incorrect answer. The kids had to be there before 7.30 or they will be hungry. Latest time non starving kid can be there is 7.30 not 9am.

It is "oh btw classes start at 9 but your kid have to be before 7.30".

There are two possible latest times and it really cannot be answered until we know if kid ate or not. Is it possible to bring non fed kid at 9, sure but it's not right. This is poorly stated question for a comprehension test.

Because it is not stated whether kid is fed or not, therefore latest possible time is 7.30

    KidFed Arrival Outcome
    True   7.30    Good
    False  7.30    Good
    True   9.00    Good
    False  9.00    Bad

9.00 is only time with possible bad outcome.

My point is that it is very poorly specified test and that's causing poor results.

I agree - there is a sample sentence comprehension - and you have to work hard to understand what the intent of the question is (far harder than actually trying to comprehend the question)

>>> The sentence-processing items require the respondent to assess whether a sentence makes sense in terms of the properties of the real world or the internal logic of the sentence.

Now "a person who is 20 is older than a person who is 30". Does that "make sense"? Is "sense" meaning the statement is true or not?

If we ignore if the statement is true and just go with making sense then the next question

"a comfortable pillow is soft and rocky" also makes sense even if it is wrong - but i suspect that would be makred as not making sense.

By reading the description of these tasks on https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-555-x/2013001/t/tbl1.... it feels like it is more of a intelligence test then just straight literacy one.

*than

...and it probably means I would fail the test...

Half of Canadians are of below-average intelligence, too.

Lower your expectations, guys.

Below median intelligence, for average we don't know.

The point remains that there are a lot of people who aren't going to find reading or math to be fulfilling intellectual activities.

Yes, noticed that by reading the comments on CBC's site.

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