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The Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) Survey: Numeracy Skills and Education in New Zealand & Australia

Publication Details

This report provides an initial investigation into the relationships between education level, numeracy, participation in up-skilling and self-assessed numeracy through the adult populations of New Zealand and Australia.

Author(s): Comparative Education Research Unit, Research Division

Date Published: August 2009

What information did the ALL survey capture?

The ALL survey measured proficiency among 16-65 year-olds1 in four “domains”. One of these of these is part of the focus of the present document:

“Numeracy” is the ability to understand and process mathematical and numerical information.

The ALL survey also collected information on the background of respondents. This includes factors such as the respondent’s gender, ethnicity, age-group, labour-force status and employment status.

One part of the background education collected in the ALL survey is respondents’ education level2. In this document – to allow robust statistics to be reported – these will be grouped as follows:

Lower secondary or less: the respondent completed at most Year 10 (or the equivalent).3

Upper secondary: the respondent completed more than Year 10 (or the equivalent) but no more than Year 13 (or the equivalent).4

Tertiary: the respondent participated in a tertiary education programme.

Footnotes

  1. Note that 15-year-olds and 66-75-year-olds ware also sampled in the Australian ALL survey but were not included in the analyses in the present document.
  2. In the ALL survey, educational level is coded using the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED).
  3. New Zealanders with lower secondary or less education most likely left school before having an opportunity to sit School Certificate or NCEA level 1.
  4. People with higher secondary education will have stayed at school long enough to sit school qualifications.

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