First Report

National Health Literacy Survey

ON September 6, 2006, the National Center for Educational Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education released The Health Literacy of America's Adults: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL).

The results are based on assessment tasks designed specifically to measure the health literacy of adults living in the United States. Health literacy was reported using four performance levels used in the NAAL study: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate, and Proficient.

The majority of adults (53 percent) had Intermediate health literacy. About 22 percent had Basic and 14 percent had Below Basic health literacy. The report looked at health insurance coverage and where adults get information about health issues.

For example, adults with Below Basic or Basic health literacy were less likely than adults with higher health literacy to get information about health issues from written sources (newspapers, magazines, books, brochures, or the Internet) and more likely than adults with higher health literacy to get a lot of information about health issues from radio and television.

Reading in the Workplace

Pathways to Employee Success

There is a strong relationship between reading skill and job performance.

LOW levels of literacy cause costly and dangerous mistakes in the workplace. There are other costs—in billions of dollars— resulting from low productivity, poor quality of products and services, mistakes, absenteeism, and lost management time.

The1992 National Assessment of Adult Literacy and the 1994-98 international survey included a number of questions about the respondents' work at the time of the survey and in the prior year, their weekly wages and annual earnings, and their recent educational and training activities.

The Educational Testing Service published a policy report based on those findings, Pathways to Labor Market Success: The Literacy Proficiencies of U.S. Adults.

Like the U.S. military studies of literacy, this report showed the relationship between reading skills and job performance. The report showed that the proficiency gaps between U.S. workers at the top of the skills distribution and those at the bottom were consistently larger than the gaps found in other high-income countries. In fact, inequality in the distribution of literacy skills among the employed in the United States was among the largest of all the high-income countries examined.

The employment percentages of U.S. adults of different literacy levels. Source: IALS 1994.

Those with the highest levels of literacy skills had the highest and best paid positions. Those with the lowest levels of literacy skills had the lowest positions and income. The mean annual earnings of the employed with a Level-5 proficiency were typically three times as high as those of workers who scored in Level 1. Workers whose job duties involved more reading, writing, and math-related tasks were considerably more likely to have received education or training from their employers.

Perhaps the most striking finding is that a large majority of workers in the United States, even in Levels 1 and 2, believe that their existing reading, writing, and arithmetic skills on their current jobs are good or excellent. Relatively few workers believe that their existing proficiencies will limit their future job opportunities.