Functional Literacy and Daily Self-Maintenance

"Citizens of literate societies take for granted that they are routinely called upon to read instructions, fill out forms, determine best buys, decipher bus schedules, and otherwise read and write to cope with the myriad details of everyday life. But such tasks are difficult for many people. The problem is seldom that they cannot read or write the words, but usually that they are unable to carry out the mental operations the task calls for—to compare two items, grasp an abstract concept, provide comprehensible and accurate information about themselves, follow a set of instructions, and so on. This is what it means to have poor “functional literacy.”

Functional literacy has been a major public policy concern, as illustrated by the U.S. Department of Education’s various efforts to gauge its level in different segments of the American population. Tests of functional literacy essentially mimic individually-administered intelligence tests, except that all their items come from everyday life, such as calculating a tip (see extended discussion in Gottfredson, 1997b). As on intelligence tests, differences in item difficulty rest on the items’ cognitive complexity (their abstractness, amount of distracting irrelevant information, and degree of inference required), not on their readability per se or the level of education test takers have completed. Literacy researchers have concluded, with some surprise, that functional literacy represents a general capacity to learn, reason, and solve problems—a veritable description of g.

The National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS; Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993) groups literacy scores into five levels. Individuals scoring in Level 1 have an 80% chance of successfully performing tasks similar in difficulty to locating an expiration date on a driver’s license and totaling a bank deposit slip. They are not routinely able to perform Level 2 tasks, such as determining the price difference between two show tickets or filling in background information on an application for a social security card. Level 3 difficulty includes writing a brief letter explaining an error in a credit card bill and using a flight schedule to plan travel. Level 4 tasks include restating an argument made in a lengthy news article and calculating the money needed to raise a child based on information in a news article. Only at Level 5 are individuals routinely able to perform mental tasks as complex as summarizing two ways that lawyers challenge prospective jurors (based on a passage discussing such practices) and, with a calculator, determining the total cost of carpet to cover a room.

Although these tasks might seem to represent only the inconsequential minutiae of everyday life, they sample the large universe of mostly untutored tasks that modern life demands of adults. Consistently failing them is not just a daily inconvenience, but a compounding problem. Likening functional literacy to money—it always helps to have more—, literacy researchers point out that rates of socioeconomic distress and pathology (unemployment, adult poverty, etc.) rise steadily at successively lower levels of functional literacy (as is the pattern for IQ too; Gottfredson, 2002a). Weaker learning, reasoning, and problem solving ability translates into poorer life chances. The cumulative disadvantage can be large, because individuals at literacy Levels 1 or 2 “are not likely to be able to perform the range of complex literacy tasks that the National Education Goals Panel considers important for competing successfully in a global economy and exercising fully the rights and responsibilities of citizenship” (Baldwin et al., 1995, p. 16). Such disadvantage is common, too, because 40% of the adult white population and 80% of the adult black population cannot routinely perform above Level 2. Fully 14% and 40%, respectively, cannot routinely perform even above Level 1 (Kirsch et al., 1993, pp. 119-121). To claim that lower-ability citizens will only be victimized by the public knowing that differences in intelligence are real, stubborn, and important is to ignore the practical hurdles they face."

Source:

Suppressing intelligence research: Hurting those we intend to help

Linda S. Gottfredson (2005)

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->The adults who performed in Levels 1 and 2 did not necessarily perceive themselves as being "at risk." 66 to 75 percent of the adults in the lowest level and 93 to 97 percent in the second lowest level described themselves as being able to read or write English "well" or "very well."

Sex Differences in Reading Achievement

Sex Differences in Reading Achievement
Richard Lynn and Jaan Mikk; 2009


Abstract

In the last century many studies have revealed the advantages of girls in reading and superiority of boys in science. However, the international tests detected no difference in science test results in the 21st century. The aim of the study was to find the sex effect size and variances in reading achievement in recent international studies. The analysis of PISA 2000, 2003, and 2006 data and the PIRLS 2001 and 2006 data revealed that the advantages in reading achievement of ten-year old girls was 0.23d and that of 15-year old girls was 0.42d. One explanation of girls’ higher achievement in reading is in their deeper engagement in language related activities. Comparisons with other studies and possible implications are shown.

Reading Ability and Intelligence:

>It is common knowledge in psychometrics that a standardized test of reading comprehension is a good proxy for an IQ test. But this is true only if the persons tested are already skilled in word reading. In the psychology of reading, it is important to distinguish between the processes of decoding the symbols that constitute written or printed words (also known as "word reading") and comprehension, or understanding sentences or paragraphs.

The acquisition of decoding skill in young children is highly related to mental age (and to IQ in children of the same chronological age). But after word reading skill is fairly mastered, it is only weakly diagnostic of IQ or g. Children with average or above-average IQ who, with the typical reading instruction in the elementary grades, are still having trouble with word reading by age eight or nine are usually regarded as having specific reading disability and are in need of expert diagnosis and special instruction.

Some 10 to 15 percent of school children are found to have a developmental reading disability. There are two main causes of reading problems, varying in severity and amenability to remediation. One is a slow rate of mental development (manifested as low IQ on nonverbal tests); the other is various forms of dyslexia, in which the reading disability is highly specific and unrelated to g. Children diagnosed as dyslexic may, in fact, obtain very high scores on g-loaded tests if the test does not require reading. Specific reading disabilities show up almost entirely in the decoding aspect of reading, and decoding per se is not highly g-demanding. However, unless the decoding process becomes highly automatized, it occupies working memory (the central information-processing unit) to some extent, thereby hindering full comprehension of the material being read.

People differ much more in reading comprehension than in decoding skill. And it is reading comprehension that is the most unavoidable of the g-loaded activities in the whole educational process. The educational psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, as early as 1917, likened the process of reading comprehension to that of reasoning. He well described the aspects of reading comprehension that demand the full use of working memory and cause it to be highly g loaded: "The mind is assailed as it were by every word in the paragraph. It must select, repress, soften, emphasize, correlate and organize, all under the influence of the right mental set of purpose and demand." Every one of the verbs used here by Thorndike describes a g-related function.

It is probably because of the g demand of reading comprehension that educators have noticed a marked increase in individual differences in scholastic performance, and its increased correlation with IQ, between the third and fourth grades in school. In grades one to three, pupils are learning to read. Beginning in grade four and beyond they are reading to learn. At this latter stage, a deficiency in decoding skills becomes a serious handicap for comprehension. The vast majority of pupils, however, acquires adequate decoding skill by grade four, and from there on, the development of reading comprehension, with its heavy g saturation, closely parallels the pupil's mental age (as measured by IQ tests). Except for the small percentage of persons with specific reading disabilities, the level of reading comprehension of persons who have been exposed to four or more years of schooling is very highly related to their level of g, as measured by both verbal or nonverbal tests.

Unless an individual has made the transition from word reading to reading comprehension of sentences and paragraphs, reading is neither pleasurable nor practically useful. Few adults with an IQ of eighty (the tenth percentile of the overall population norm) ever make the transition from word reading skill to reading comprehension. The problem of adult illiteracy (defined as less than a fourth-grade level of reading comprehension) in a society that provides an elementary school education to virtually its entire population is therefore largely a problem of the lower segment of the population distribution of g. In the vast majority of people with low reading comprehension, the problem is not word reading per se, but lack of comprehension. These individuals score about the same on tests of reading comprehension even if the test paragraphs are read aloud by the examiner. In other words, individual differences in oral comprehension and in reading comprehension are highly correlated.<

Arthur Jensen - 1998
The g Factor;

A Twin and Adoption Study of Reading Achievement: Exploration of Shared-Environmental and Gene-Environment-Interaction Effects

A Twin and Adoption Study of Reading Achievement: Exploration of Shared-Environmental and Gene-Environment-Interaction Effects
Robert M Kirkpatrick et al.; 2011
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130536/


Abstract

Existing behavior-genetic research implicates substantial influence of heredity and modest influence of shared environment on reading achievement and reading disability. Applying DeFries-Fulker analysis to a combined sample of twins and adoptees (N = 4,886, including 266 reading-disabled probands), the present study replicates prior findings of considerable heritability for both reading achievement and reading disability. A simple biometric model adequately described parent and offspring data (combined N = 9,430 parents and offspring) across differing types of families present in the sample Analyses yielded a high heritability estimate (around 0.70) and a negligible shared-environmentality estimate for both reading achievement and reading disability. No evidence of gene × environment interaction was found for parental reading ability and parental educational attainment, the two moderators analyzed.

Intelligence and reading ability in grades 2–12

Intelligence and reading ability in grades 2–12
Ronald P Carver
Intelligence, October- December 1990


Abstract

It has been hypothesized that the relationship between reading ability and intelligence—as measured by the Raven Progressive Matrices test—is small and insignificant. It has also been hypothesized that this relationship is higher in the upper grades of school as compared to the lower grades. These two hypotheses were investigated by administering the Raven Progressive Matrices test and the National Reading Standards test to 486 students in Grades 2–12 of a small-town, rural school district. The correlations between these two tests for each of Grades 2–12 varied from about .40 to .60 with an average of about .50. There was no trend indicating that the correlation increased with each grade in school. Criteria have been developed for judging the effect size of correlations, and this .50 correlation would be considered as large. These data can be interpreted as indicating that general intelligence, as measured by the Raven test, has a strong and consistent relationship to reading ability.

[If alphabetism is the ability to vocalize written words, there are not many analphabets in the Western world. If alphabetism is the ability to understand written material, every human population contains quite a few analphabets.]

Genes & Reading Ability

Nature, nurture, and expertise
Robert Plomin et al.; 2013
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000810


Abstract

Rather than investigating the extent to which training can improve performance under experimental conditions (‘what could be’), we ask about the origins of expertise as it exists in the world (‘what is’). We used the twin method to investigate the genetic and environmental origins of exceptional performance in reading, a skill that is a major focus of educational training in the early school years. Selecting reading experts as the top 5% from a sample of 10,000 12-year-old twins assessed on a battery of reading tests, three findings stand out. First, we found that genetic factors account for more than half of the difference in performance between expert and normal readers. Second, our results suggest that reading expertise is the quantitative extreme of the same genetic and environmental factors that affect reading performance for normal readers. Third, growing up in the same family and attending the same schools account for less than a fifth of the difference between expert and normal readers. We discuss implications and interpretations (‘what is inherited is DNA sequence variation’; ‘the abnormal is normal’). Finally, although there is no necessary relationship between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’, the most far-reaching issues about the acquisition of expertise lie at the interface between them (‘the nature of nurture: from a passive model of imposed environments to an active model of shaped experience’).