alt Hacker News> Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8
A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp for 2023:
> Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent.
The literacy proficiency levels section on https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp describes what Level 1 means:
> Adults at level 1 are able to locate information on a text page, find a relevant link from a website, and identify relevant text among multiple options when the relevant information is explicitly cued. They can understand the meaning of short texts, as well as the organization of lists or multiple sections within a single page.
28% of US adults are just at or below that level.
Replies
in the intermediate oecd [piaacs report] pages 64ff (PDF page 66ff) there are bar charts indicating the percentiles of each level for each participating nation.
the report also visualizes not only inter country but also intra country outcomes correlating socio economic influences (age, parents, family migration history, ...) and level of education (school, high school, college and higher) with test outcome (literacy, numerics problem solving)
it also has 10y ago/now comparison.
a trove for the Q "how are we doing, capability wise?"
thanks for pointing to the study!!
[piaacs report] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
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>A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.
Yes and AI isn't to blame for that as adults predate AI. It's the governments, schools, teachers, parents, teacher's unios, who taught them(or more accurately didn't teach them) and graduated them out of school anyway regardless just so they don't look bad in statistics. Sorry but if you graduate people out of high school who can't read you should be trialed for fraud. Simple as.
People blaming AI for adults unable to read puts us back to the 90s when Doom was to blame for school shootings or back to 60s when rock music was to blame for juvenile delinquency, all of them being wrong, and they're wrong here too. People always want to blame a third party external scapegoat that isn't' the parents and isn't the government, for the problems of their kids.
Someone always finds a way to shit on the US. Every single time.
A notable effect that skews those numbers a bit is that the test for literacy is often given in English only, meaning any people in the US who can read and write Spanish but not English are counted as illiterate. (It's slightly more complex than this, some states let you take it in Spanish, some have the option but still usually give it in English most of the time, but the effect is the same)