Reply #6: You're right, of course. It's actually 42 million when defined as [View All]

[Cerridwen]

"below basic prose literacy." It's only 36 million when defined as "below basic document literacy" and it's 66 million when defined as "below basic quantitative literacy."

From: this .pdf link from
U.S. Department of Education
Institute of Education Sciences
National Assessment of Adult Literacy

Unlike indirect measures of
literacy, which rely on self reports
of literacy skills or
educational attainment, the
assessment measures literacy by
asking respondents to demonstrate
that they understand the
meaning of information found
in texts they are asked to read.

The literacy tasks in the assessment
were drawn from actual
texts and documents, which
were either used in their original
format or reproduced in
the assessment booklets. Each
question appeared before the
materials needed to answer it,
thus encouraging respondents
to read with purpose.

Respondents could correctly
answer many assessment questions
by skimming the text or
document for the information
necessary to perform a
given literacy task. All tasks
were open-ended.

Literacy defined

Prose Literacy

The knowledge and skills
needed to perform prose
tasks (i.e., to search, comprehend,
and use information
from continuous texts).

Document Literacy

The knowledge and skills
needed to perform document
tasks (i.e., to search, comprehend,
and use information
from noncontinuous texts in
various formats).

Quantitative Literacy

The knowledge and skills
required to perform quantitative
tasks (i.e., to identify and
perform computations, either
alone or sequentially, using
numbers embedded in printed
materials).