Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey: Public Use Microdata File

This product, offered on CD-ROM, contains the public microdata for the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey.

The Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL) is a large-scale co-operative effort undertaken in 2003, 2006 and 2008 by governments, national statistics agencies, research institutions and multi-lateral agencies. The ALL study builds on the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS),the world's first internationally comparative survey of adult skills undertaken in three rounds of data collection between 1994 and 1998.

The foundation skills measured in the ALL survey include prose literacy, document literacy, numeracy and problem solving. Additional skills assessed indirectly include familiarity with and use of information and communication technologies.

The development and management of the study were co-ordinated by Statistics Canada and the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in collaboration with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) of the United States Department of Education, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean (OREALC) and the Institute for Statistics (UIS) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

This dataset is composed of seven countries or regions that collected data in 2003. They include Bermuda, Canada, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, the United States and the Mexican State of Nuevo Leon. Additionally data is included for three other countries that collected data in 2006 and 2008 which are Hungary, Netherlands, and New Zealand.