Adult skills
Updated: 10 December 2024
Next update: Not yet determined
2023 | |||
---|---|---|---|
Literacy | Numeracy | Adaptive problemsolving | |
Less than level 1 | 6.4 | 4.4 | 4.4 |
Level 1 | 8.5 | 9.1 | 10.7 |
Level 2 | 24.3 | 24.8 | 34.5 |
Level 3 | 40.7 | 39.3 | 41.4 |
Level 4-5 | 20.0 | 22.4 | 8.9 |
More figures from this statistics
- 14465: Adult skills, by proficiency level and age (per cent)
- 14466: Adult skills, by proficiency level and sex (per cent)
- 14467: Adult skills, by proficiency level and level of education (per cent)
- 14468: Adult skills, by proficiency level and immigrant background (per cent)
- 14469: Proficiency scores among adults, by domain, sex and age (point)
About the statistics
The statistics provide an overview of skills in literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem solving among the population aged 16 to 65 years. It is based on the PIAAC survey (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) conducted in 2012 and 2023.
The information under «About the statistics» was last updated 9 December 2024.
Concepts and definitions in the PIAAC are in accordance with the demands set by OECD.
Literacy
Literacy is defined as the ability to access, understand, evaluate and reflect on written texts in order to achieve one’s goals, to develop one’s knowledge and potential, and to participate in society. Literacy encompasses a range of skills from the decoding of written words and sentences to the comprehension, interpretation and evaluation of complex texts. This is a basic skill for developing more advanced skills individually, and it is also important for the economic and social development of society. Literacy was mapped both in 2012 and in 2023.
Numeracy
Numeracy is the ability to access, use, reason critically with mathematical content, information and ideas represented in multiple ways in order to engage in and manage the mathematical demands of a range of situations in adult life. Numeracy describes the ability to handle different situations that require mathematical knowledge and demands the ability to solve problems using mathematical information. This is a basic skill in a time when people are facing an increasing amount and a broader spectrum of numerical and mathematical information in daily life. Numeracy was mapped both in 2012 and in 2023.
Adaptive problem solving
Adaptive problem solving is the ability to achieve one’s goals in a dynamic situation in which a method for solution is not immediately available. It requires engaging in cognitive and metacognitive processes to define the problem, search for information, and apply a solution in a variety of information environments and contexts. The capacity to flexibly adapt problem-solving strategies to different contexts and situations is an important skill, both privately and in the workplace. Adaptive problem solving was mapped in 2023.
Problem solving in technology-rich environments
The ability to use digital technology, communication tools and networks to acquire and evaluate information, communicate with others and perform practical tasks. The assessment focuses on the abilities to solve problems for personal, work and civic purposes by setting up appropriate goals and plans, and accessing and making use of information through computers and computer networks.
Skill levels
All skills are measured on a scale from 0 to 500, but it is important to note that these scales are distinct, and scores on the different skill scales should not be directly compared. The scale in each skill area is described based on the difficulty of the tasks placed at various points on the scale. The scales are divided into “skill levels” based on specific score thresholds: six levels for literacy and numeracy (below level 1 and levels 1 to 5) and five levels for adaptive problem-solving (below level 1 and levels 1 to 4).
Skill levels by score achieved (points)
Skill | Below level 1 | Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 | Level 5 |
Literacy | 175 or below | 176 - 225 | 226 - 275 | 276 - 325 | 326 - 375 | 376 or more |
Numeracy | 175 or below | 176 - 225 | 226 - 275 | 276 - 325 | 326 - 375 | 376 or more |
Adaptive problem solving | 175 or below | 176 - 225 | 226 - 275 | 276 - 325 | 326 or more |
|
Literacy
Level / range score | Description |
Below level 1 (less then 176) | Most adults below Level 1 are able to process meaning at the sentence level. Given a series of sentences that increase |
Level 1 (176-225) | Adults at Level 1 are able to locate information on a page of text, find a relevant link from a website, and identify |
Level 2 (226-275) | At Level 2, adults are able to access and understand information in longer texts with some distracting information. They |
Level 3 (276-325) | Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to |
Level 4 (326-375) | At Level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve |
Level 5 (376-500) | At Level 5, the assessment provides no direct information on what adults can do. This is mostly because feasibility |
Numeracy
Level / range score | Description |
Below level 1 (less then 176) | Adults performing below Level 1 demonstrate elementary whole number sense and can access and use mathematical |
Level 1 (176-225) | Adults at Level 1 demonstrate number sense involving whole numbers, decimals, and common fractions and percentages. |
Level 2 (226-275) | Adults at Level 2 can access, act on and use mathematical information and evaluate simple claims, in tasks set in a variety |
Level 3 (276-325) | Adults at Level 3 can access, act on, use, reflect on and evaluate authentic mathematical contexts. This requires making |
Level 4 (326-375) | Adults at Level 4 can use and apply a range of problem-solving strategies to access, analyse, reason and critically reflect |
Level 5 (376-500) | Adults at Level 5 can use and apply problem-solving strategies to analyse, evaluate, reason and critically reflect on |
Adaptive problem solving
Level / range score | Description |
Below level 1 (less then 176) | Adults performing below Level 1 understand very simple static problems situated within a clearly structured |
Level 1 (176-225) | Adults at Level 1 are able to understand simple problems, and develop and implement solutions to solve them. |
Level 2 (226-275) | Adults at Level 2 can identify and apply solutions that consist of several steps to problems that require one target |
Level 3 (276-325) | Adults at Level 3 understand problems that are either static but more complex, or have an average to high level of |
Level 4 (326-375) | Adults at Level 4 are able to define the nature of problems in ill-structured and information-rich contexts. They can |
In 2012, level of education is coded according to ISCED97. In 2023, we use ISCED2011. The statistics also use the Standard for classification of immigration categories.
Name: Adult skills
Topic: Education
Division for Education and Culture Statistics
Whole country
The PIAAC survey is conducted every 10 years. PIAAC2 was conducted between September 2022 and April 2023. PIAAC1 was conducted in Norway between August 2011 and April 2012.
Data are delivered to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Collected and revised data are stored securely by Statistics Norway in compliance with applicable legislation on data processing.
Statistics Norway can grant access to the source data (de-identified microdata) on which the statistics are based, for researchers and public authorities for the purposes of preparing statistical results and analyses until 2072. Access can be granted upon application and subject to conditions. Refer to the details about this at Access to data from Statistics Norway.
A public use file is also delivered to the OECD.
PIAAC is the largest international survey of adult skills, conducted in Norway in 2012 (PIAAC1) and in 2023 (PIAAC2). The purpose of the survey is to map the skill levels in the adult population by directly measuring skills, meaning that respondents solve tasks. In addition to test tasks, the PIAAC survey also includes a comprehensive questionnaire, which makes it possible to view skills in the context of various background variables, including work experience, education level, and different demographic characteristics. PIAAC2 also maps respondents’ personality factors through the Five-Factor Model (Big 5).
The fact that the survey is conducted every ten years has led to changes in what is measured and how. PIAAC2 measures skills in reading comprehension, numeracy, and adaptive problem-solving using digital testing. In PIAAC1, in addition to reading and numeracy, problem-solving in ICT environments was measured, and testing was conducted either on a PC or on paper. Reading and numeracy were also mapped in the predecessors to PIAAC, and Norway participated in both The Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL) in 2003 and the second round of The International Adult Literacy Survey (SIALS) in 1998.
By providing the relevant authorities and other users with information about skills in the adult population, PIAAC contributes to the knowledge base for policy development both in Norway and at the international level. Key users include the ministries, international organisations, researchers, trade unions and media.
No external users have access to statistics before they are released on ssb.no after at least three months’ advance notice in the release calendar. This is one of the most important principles in Statistics Norway for ensuring the equal treatment of users.
International results of the survey have been known to the Ministry of Education and Research and the Ministry for Labour and Social Inclusion had access to international results through their role in the international PIAAC Board of participating countries.
The statistics are developed, produced and disseminated pursuant to Act no. 32 of 21 June 2019 relating to official statistics and Statistics Norway (the Statistics Act).
PIAAC covers the adult population (aged 16 to 65), with the exception of persons living in institutions.
The target population for PIAAC is residents aged 16 to 65. People without a residence and those living in collective housing units (such as healthcare institutions, prisons, military camps) are not included in the target population. To calculate the skill level in this group at the national level, each participating country must conduct a certain number of interviews. The minimum requirement in PIAAC2 varies between 4,000 and 5,000 completed interviews, depending on the number of sampling stages and the expected design effect. The sample size was calculated based on the minimum requirement and the expected response rate.
In PIAAC2, a main sample of 7,800 people was drawn. To ensure a sufficient number of respondents, an additional sample of 2,180 people was also drawn, which could be used if the main sample did not provide a sufficient number of interviews. The samples were drawn as simple random samples based on residents in the Population Register as of 01.06.2022. Since the data collection in PIAAC2 was to take place over several months, the sample was drawn based on age in the middle of the data collection period, namely age as of 31.12.2022. The entire reserve sample was included in the total sample.
In PIAAC1, a sample of 8,506 people was drawn, along with a reserve sample of 1,705 people. There was no need to use the reserve sample.
The data collection for PIAAC2 was conducted from September 2022 to June 2023, while the field period for PIAAC1 was from August 2011 to May 2012. The PIAAC survey is multi-part. First, respondents are guided through an interview, and then they answer tasks. In PIAAC2, tasks were to be solved on a tablet. While the interview could be conducted in either Norwegian or English, the self-administered task section could only be completed in Norwegian. In PIAAC1, tasks were carried out using a PC and paper exercise booklets. For detailed information on data collection, see also the documentation reports for PIAAC1 and PIAAC2.
The background interview was divided into various themes, with questions about factors that can affect the skills measured by PIAAC:
A: Demographic information: Questions about the respondent’s age, gender, country of birth, parents’ country of birth, and which language(s) the respondent learned and speaks at home.
B: Education and organized training: Questions related to the respondent’s formal education – highest completed, field of study, etc., and non-formal training, such as courses and other organized training the respondent has undergone.
C: Labor market status: The respondent’s employment status at the time of the interview, previous career, etc.
D: Current job or business: Questions about the respondent’s current occupation and income, number of employees where the respondent works, type of employment contract, job tasks, etc.
E: Last job or business (not working but has worked in the last five years): Questions about the respondent’s last job, reasons for not working now, etc.
F: Skills used in current/last job: Questions related to the respondent’s use of literacy and numeracy skills in the job, as well as the use of ICT in the workplace.
G: Use of skills in everyday life: Questions about the respondent’s use of PCs and other digital devices (e.g., smartphones) outside of work.
H: Respondent’s activities at work: Questions about the respondent’s job tasks and autonomy in the workplace, the work environment, including teamwork, inclusion, problem-solving, etc.
I: Individual characteristics: Questions about the respondent’s attitudes and activities, including participation in volunteer work, satisfaction with life, general health status, etc.
J: Background information: Questions about the respondent’s parents/guardians, partner, children, childhood, parents’/guardians’ education, etc.
K (only in PIAAC2): Social and emotional dimensions: Questions about the respondent’s social and emotional skills, measured through personality traits such as openness to experience, emotional stability, etc.
PIAAC2, unlike previous surveys, also estimates skills among the part of the adult population that cannot participate in the survey due to language barriers. These respondents participated in a short interview, the doorstep interview, where information about gender, age, education, employment status, country of birth, and number of years residing in Norway was collected.
Once the questions in PIAAC2 are answered, respondents proceed to the task section. After an introduction and training in using the tablet, the respondent is asked to solve 16 initial tasks – eight in “reading comprehension” and eight in “numeracy.” The score on these tasks determines which of three paths the respondent follows: those who do not pass the initial test (path 1) only answer tasks that assess basic reading and numeracy skills, while those who score low (path 2) and those who score high (path 3) also answer tasks from two of the three skill areas. No respondents receive tasks from all three domains. The tasks vary in difficulty and are not necessarily the same for all respondents. This is because no one receives all the tasks, and also because tasks in reading and numeracy are adaptively designed. This means that if a task is answered correctly, the difficulty level of the next task is either the same or higher.
For each area, a skill score from 0 to 500 is calculated, reflecting a person’s skills in reading comprehension, numeracy, and adaptive problem-solving. This calculation is done using methods within Item Response Theory (IRT) and involves combining responses from the questionnaire and tasks to calculate the probability that respondents can solve tasks of varying difficulty.
For detailed information about the PIAAC questionnaire and tasks, as well as the calculation of task scores, see the PIAAC technical report for PIAAC1 and PIAAC2, available at http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac.
The net sample in PIAAC2 consists of 4,053 people, of whom 64 only completed the doorstep interview. Using Statistics Norway’s standard for calculating the response rate, the actual effect of the data collection is 43 percent. In PIAAC1, the response rate was 62 percent, and the net sample consisted of 5,128 people.
The sample is intended to reflect the population in terms of the distribution of age groups, gender, education level, and other background variables. However, not all individuals in a gross sample respond to the survey, which introduces biases. Weighting and calibration were used to adjust for the biases that arise. See the documentation report for each survey for a detailed description of the process.
Interviewers and everyone who works at Statistics Norway have a duty of confidentiality. Statistics Norway has its own data protection officer.
Statistics Norway does not publish figures where there is a risk of identifying individual data about persons or households. Therefore, we do not publish results for groups with fewer than 60 observations.
More information can be found on Statistics Norway’s website under Methods in official statistics, in the ‘Confidentiality’ section.
The content in the PIAAC, ALL, and IALS is harmonized prior to data collection, allowing for direct comparison of results between countries for each survey. Comparing results between surveys requires taking into account changes in measurement instruments, implementation methods, and modeling of non-response. However, it is important to emphasize that the skills required in today’s society have changed. For example, having good reading and numeracy skills today means something different than in the 1990s, as we now have to deal with digital texts and new information channels.
Comparison of results between PIAAC2 and PIAAC1
PIAAC2 also estimates skills among the part of the adult population that cannot participate in the survey due to language barriers, which was not done in previous surveys. To compare results from PIAAC1 and PIAAC2, the doorstep interviews must therefore be excluded from the PIAAC2 data. Additionally, PIAAC2 has introduced several methodological changes, such as comprehensive digital testing and the inclusion of basic tasks on the main scales, which contribute to increased uncertainty when comparing results from different surveys, cycles, or years. To compare scores in literacy and numeracy between PIAAC1 and PIAAC2, the so-called “linking error” must therefore be added to the standard error when comparing certain measures, such as the mean or percentile values. This does not apply when comparing differences in the number of points, because the uncertainties in two point values will cancel each other out when calculating the difference. The linking error between PIAAC1 and PIAAC2 is estimated to be 3.27 for reading comprehension and 2.95 for numeracy.
Comparison of results between PIAAC2 and the predecessors to PIAAC (IALS and ALL)
It is possible to compare skill results between PIAAC and previous surveys, but since there are no exact measures of linking error for IALS and ALL, it is assumed that the linking error is zero, which may lead to underestimating the uncertainty in the trend analysis.
PIAAC is a survey, and surveys can have different sources of error.
Errors can occur both during data collection and processing. Collecting data through a questionnaire allows for the inclusion of filters, so that questions are adapted to the respondent’s answers to previous questions, and error messages can be included if the interviewer enters answers that are not consistent with previous answers.
Collection errors can also arise if the respondent provides incorrect answers. This may be due to difficulties in recalling past events or misunderstandings of questions. The respondent may also give incorrect answers to questions if they are perceived as sensitive.
Processing errors are deviations between the value that is recorded and the value that is ultimately reported. Various checks have been conducted to identify and correct errors.
At the start of data collection for PIAAC2, there was an error in the exercise section that caused the exercises to take a very long time. We found that some respondents took over 4 hours to complete the survey. The length of time taken for the exercises may have affected the results for some respondents who spent a very long time. Some respondents had to interrupt the interview because they no longer had time available. A new version of the interview program was released on October 27, 2022, which reduced the time required for the exercises. After this, the average time for an interview was reduced to about 2 hours, which was what respondents were initially told.
Through sample surveys, we can estimate the skill level in a large group (the population) by measuring the level only in a smaller sample drawn from the population. This provides significant savings compared to conducting the measurement in the entire population, but at the same time, we get some uncertainty in the estimates. We can calculate this uncertainty when we know the probability that each unit in the population will be selected for the sample.
The method used to calculate an estimate is called an estimator. There are two important aspects of an estimator. First, the estimator should provide approximately the correct value with repeated attempts. This means it “hits the target” in the sense that with repeated sampling, the average value of the estimates will be centered around the true population value; the estimator is unbiased. Additionally, we need a measure of how much variation around the population value the estimates have with repeated sampling. This variation is the statistical uncertainty of the estimate, and the common measure is the standard error (SE) of the estimate. SE is defined as the estimated standard deviation of the estimator. SE thus indicates how much an estimate will, on average, deviate from the true value.
As an illustration: If we want to estimate the percentage of women, ( P_0 ), in a population of size ( N ). Assume the sample of size ( n ) is randomly drawn, meaning all units have the same probability ( n / N ) of being included in the sample. Let ( P ) be the percentage of women in the sample. Then ( P ) is an unbiased estimator for ( P_0 ) and the standard error is given by:
The estimation error we make is the difference between ( P ) and ( P_0 ). This is, of course, unknown, but we can provide an estimate, the margin of error, of how large it can be with a given probability. The margin of error is defined as 2· SE. The interval
( P – 2· SE , P + 2· SE )
is a 95 percent confidence interval. This means that the probability that the interval covers the true value P 0 is 0.95 (95 percent). In other words, with repeated sampling, 95 percent of the intervals will cover the true value P 0. We then say that there is 95 percent confidence that the calculated interval covers the true value.
Skill scores in PIAAC are calculated using methods within Item Response Theory (IRT), and like all estimates, they contain some uncertainty. The results in general, and the average scores in particular, should therefore always be shown with the corresponding standard error.