The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is a multicycle international survey of adult skills and competencies sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The survey examines a range of basic skills in the information age and assesses these adult skills consistently across…

The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is a multicycle survey of adult skills and competencies sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The survey examines a range of basic skills in the information age and assesses these adult skills consistently across participating…

In this new policy report, the fourth in a series examining the impact of human capital in the American labor market from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Center for Research on Human Capital Education, the authors take a unique perspective on the critical link between human capital and labor market outcomes by expanding the analysis to…

We know that opportunities exist in the United States, but if we hope to share these more equitably, we need to better understand the ways opportunities currently vary among individuals, families, states, and regions of the country. Using key measures of well-being (including poverty, income, employment, safety, and health) for each state, along…

Using the data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), this Data Point summarizes the number of U.S. adults with low levels of English literacy and describes how they differ by nativity status and race/ethnicity. PIAAC is a large-scale international study of working-age adults (ages 16-65) that assesses…

Diploma and degree completion have become the fundamental standard for judging the performance of secondary and postsecondary educational institutions. Increasingly, leaders of education and workforce policy and programs assume that these measures of attainment effectively serve as indicators of adequate levels of essential literacy and numeracy…

Background: Given the information/technology rich environment coupled with ongoing trends in population aging in the U.S., the central role that health literacy plays in determining health behaviors and outcomes has recently received an increasing amount of attention. Despite a growing research and policy focus on health literacy, some key…

While much prior research has investigated the underrepresentation of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) college majors and careers, most of this scholarship has looked at the level of academic discipline, occupation, or mathematical proficiency, rather than assessing potential gender differences in the use of numeracy…

This paper uses data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) to analyze the relationship between self-reported health and (a) literacy, numeracy, and technological problem-solving skills, and (b) post-initial learning for U.S. respondents, and to determine whether those relationships vary by race/ethnicity…