UNDERSTANDING DOCUMENT LITERACY: VARIABLES UNDERLYING THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUNG ADULTS

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to identify a set of critical variables that underlie the performance of a national sample of young adults on a diverse set of document literacy tasks. The identification of these variables provides an important first step toward building a theoretical model that would systematically account for the constructs of document processing. With such a theoretical model, document designers and instructional‐program developers could use their understanding of document‐processing constructs in ways that could strategically address the production and processing of documents.The sixty‐one tasks (and their associated documents) that make up the document scale of the NAEP Young Adult Literacy assessment were parsed using a specially devised grammar. Based upon the parsings, variables were identified to account for the probability of success for the total population and for major subgroups of interest. The variables identified accounted for 89 percent of the variance for the total population of young adults. Among racial/ethnic groups, these variables accounted for 89 percent of the variance for White, 81 percent for Black, and 87 percent for Hispanic young adults. Among levels of education, these variables accounted for 56 percent of the variance for young adults with 0–8 years of schooling, 81 percent for young adults with 9 to 12 years of schooling, 88 percent for young adults with high‐school degrees, and 84 percent for young adults with post‐high‐school degrees. The findings of this study are discussed in terms of the need to provide a more general framework for describing, comparing, and researching documents than has been the case in previous document studies.