National Adult Literacy Database

This document is part of a National Adult Literacy Database (NALD) project, funded by the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), aimed at providing a way of quickly identifying the usefulness and relevancy of online, full-text research documents from Statistics Canada.

Using data from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey (IALSS), the authors explore how the amount of literacy skill available in Canada changed between 1994 and 2003.

Their analysis reveals significant document literacy skill loss in adulthood, loss that would seem to be concentrated in adults from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The amount of skill loss varies by province.

The authors point out that the study is important because the amount of document literacy skill that adults possess has been shown to influence what people earn, and how rapidly the size of the economy can grow.