Because nearly half of the adult population in the U.S. and many other countries have low literacy skills, it’s important to include these people when testing content in documents and web sites written for a “general audience.”
Here are some links to materials that further explore the issue of low literacy:
- Recruiting Participants with Low Literacy Skills presentation on Slideshare
- Determining Readability presentation on Slideshare
- Levels of low literacy in the U.S. from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics
- Levels of low literacy internationally from the 1998 from Literacy in the Information Age: Final Report of the International Adult Literacy Survey (pdf) and a nice graph of low literacy levels by country, both from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development
- Here’s the research study that identified the one question that identifies low literacy 83% of the time. Screening Items to Identify Patients with Limited Health Literacy Skills by Wallace, et al
- There are some excellent suggestions about how to find and recruit low lit users in How to Engage Low-Literacy and Limited-English-Proficiency Populations in Transportation Decisionmaking published by the Federal Highway Administration
- Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM): A Quick Reading Test for Patients. To obtain materials for administering the REALM, contact Terry Davis at tdavis1@lsuhsc.edu
- The Slosson Oral Reading Test (paid) and the Quick Adult Reading Inventory’s Word Reading Test (free!) are two other word recognition tests that are also quick to administer. You may prefer using one of them to the REALM for projects that aren’t healthcare-specific.