1. Stability and Change in Adult literacy and numeracy Skills: some comments
5th PIAAC International Conference, November 27-29, 2018, Bratislava
William Thorn, OECD

2. The general motivation for the paper:
Three sets of comments
The general motivation for the paper:
Life Long Learning
Aging societies
Interpreting the evidence of change in measured proficiency
The results regarding training participation

3. Overall comments
Extremely valuable and interesting work
Longitudinal dimension adds a lot to PIAAC, particularly with the retesting of literacy and numeracy

4. Motivation for the paper
Social and technological change increasingly call for life long learning
This is the received wisdom and the mantra of governments and international organisations (since 1980s in many cases)
Repetition should not be seen as a basis for truth
How true is this really?
A proposition that should be tested rather than assumed

5. Aging workforce: a problem?
Wages increase with age
Have to assume that wages reflect individual productivity to some extent
They are certainly not completely disconnected

6. Technological change
Continuous technological change over last 30 years
Not much evidence for change in rate of participation in in work related training/adult learning

7. Intra-individual variation in proficiency
An important question for a number of reasons
Test reliability
Interpretation of results (stability at individual level over the medium term provides grounds for causal interpretations)
Impact of aging and other factors on development, maintenance and loss of proficiency
Can we really look at this with PIAAC and PIAAC-L?
PIAAC is designed to provide estimates of proficiency at the population/sub-population level not at the individual level.
Each respondent takes a maximum of 24 literacy items and/or 24 numeracy items. Some take none. Not very accurate measure of individual proficiency
Would expect quite a lot of variability at individual level over two administrations of PIAAC
Would like to see more information about the retest
How many items?
Literacy and numeracy?

8. Intra-individual variation in proficiency
Results in line with related studies
Danish PISA/PIAAC follow
Canadian PISA retest
Statistics Norway
All show stability over time on same test and strong correlations between performance on school based measures (PISA, school marks) and PIAAC
Longitudinal results regarding age proficiency relationship and change in proficiency across subgroups reflected in cross- section results

9. PISA 2000 and PIAAC 2012 (mathematics/numeracy) scores Danish PISA/PIAAC sample (source: Karsten Albæk, presentation to Nordic PIAAC conference, Stockholm, November 21, 2018)

10. Mean literacy score by educational attainment and age

11. Proficiency and age by attainment

12. Training
Having longitudinal data great value in looking at causal effects of training
Cross sectional data shows strong associations between cognitive skills (literacy and numeracy) and training participation
What way does the relationship go?
Not much reason to expect observable impacts of training participation on literacy or numeracy proficiency (at least with measures available in PIAAC)
The objective of most training is not to develop such skills (effects largely incidental)
Training courses are generally of short in duration and low intensity
Impact of a year of full-time education on literacy proficiency to +7 score points

13. Mean annual training hours by age

14. Strong reasons to expect high level of selectivity based on cognitive skills (educational attainment and literacy)
Interesting that the effect of literacy remains after controlling for educational attainment and job characteristics
Proxy for general cognitive ability?

15. Interesting questions
How to interpret the results
Other measures to better capture training

16. The Matthew effect
How to conceive ‘equity’ in relation to access to training?
Not necessarily clear that the low skilled ‘need more training than the high skilled
Expect a high degree of selection into training and would want it.
How to ensure adequate access?

17. Estimated cumulative hours of training from age 30 to 65 by position in the literacy proficiency distribution

18. Find Out More About PIAAC at:
All national and international publications
The complete micro-level database
Thank you