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Comment by trane_project | Hacker News Reader

I looked this up and found this report: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf

Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess). This is a disgrace. There's no reason why every adult should not be able to read proficiently. We are talking about reading, not some obscure skill.

I wonder what these figures would be in Cuba. From what I remember reading, they were much higher because of widespread literacy campaigns.

Edit: Found the source of this figures (https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-...) which has data from more contries in the OECD. Japan scores the highest, followed by Finland.

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> Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess)

The reason they did that is called out in endnote 3, "This analysis combines the top two proficiency levels (Levels 4 and 5), following the OECD’s reporting convention (OECD 2013), because across all participating countries, no more than 2 percent of adults reached Level 5."

The PIAAC definitions of each level are here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_... and I would estimate that extremely few daily tasks would require (or even be aided by) level 5 literacy proficiency.

Most of my experience is in customer-facing roles, and I would argue that reading a customer email chain where they try to describe what is happening, sometimes with pictures, requires level 4 understanding.

You often end up with multiple documents (several emails, pictures, logs). There's often competing information (customers are speculating about what's wrong, but they likely include lots of other information because they don't actually know). And you definitely need background knowledge about the product.

Add in translating that into a bug report for the engineering team? A successful high-level customer support agent needs level 5 reading ability.

But my experience asking questions of my teammates in the company Slack channels tells me very few of them are even actually at level 3.

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