New PIAAC Results Will Be Released on December 10, 2024
We are just days away from the highly anticipated release of data from the second cycle of PIAAC on Tuesday, December 10, 2024. This release includes both the U.S. national report, Highlights of the 2023 U.S. PIAAC Results Web Report, and the international report The 2023 Survey of Adult Skills. Register here for the virtual launch of the international report on December 10 from 11:00am-12:30pm Central European Time (5:00am-7:30am Eastern Standard Time). These new results, from the United States and 30 other countries/economies, will provide an update on the status of U.S. adult skills and reveal how they have evolved since 2012/2014, a time during which we have witnessed significant advances in technology and rapid changes in the economy. Data was collected from September 2022 through June 2023, during a time when people around the world were impacted both at work and in their daily lives by the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This context may offer researchers opportunities to explore how the pandemic is related to adults’ skills, health, employment, training, and education status.
In the first cycle of PIAAC (2012-2017), we learned:
- The importance of foundational skills and their association with various social and economic outcomes,
- U.S. young adults greatly underperformed compared to their international peers,
- U.S.-born adults from immigrant families had literacy and numeracy skills similar to adults from native-born families, and
- Parental education remained closely linked to individuals’ skills even into late adulthood.
The new reports coming out on December 10 will tell us about the scope of changes in these relationships and how adults’ skills have changed—whether they have improved, declined, or remain unchanged.
What’s new in Cycle 2?
- Administration on tablets: Respondents in Cycle 2 took the assessment on a digital tablet, while Cycle 1 was offered on either a laptop or paper-and-pencil version.
- Adaptive problem-solving skills domain: Measures the ability to achieve one’s goals in dynamic situations in which a method for reaching a solution is not directly available.
- Numeracy components domain: Designed to deepen our understanding of the skills of adults with very low numeracy skills.
- Financial Literacy Background Questionnaire (BQ) module: Administered for the first time in the United States, it includes questions on:
- attitudes towards finances,
- practices in financial aspects of life, and
- knowledge of financial concepts
- Improvements to the BQ: Includes refinements to streamline the educational and career pathways questions, as well as to capture information on the working environment and the use of high-performance work practices. For more information, stay tuned for the posting of the Cycle 2 BQ on the NCES What PIAAC Measures webpage on December 10.
As in Cycle 1, the Cycle 2 study consists of a background questionnaire and a direct assessment of literacy and numeracy skills, using similar methods, making it possible to measure trends in these domains. Additionally, most of the Cycle 2 BQ remains the same as in Cycle 1, enabling trend analysis. However, an adaptive problem-solving (APS) domain has replaced Problem Solving in Technology-Rich Environments (PS-TRE). PS-TRE cannot be compared to APS. PS-TRE in Cycle 1, focused mainly on measuring proficiency in the use of specific digital applications to access, search, manage, interpret, and evaluate information. APS, on the other hand, focuses on rapidly changing work and everyday life, underlining that problem solving is a process that takes place in complex environments, with solutions requiring a constant attempt to adapt to a new situation rather than a static sequence of a number of pre-set steps. Additionally, while use of computer applications is required in all PS-TRE tasks, in APS use of computer applications is not necessarily required.
Follow NCES on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn, subscribe to the NCES News Flash, visit the PIAAC Gateway, and check out the PIAAC Buzz to stay up to date on the latest information about the PIAAC release and new resources.
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PIAAC Updates and New Publications
New NCES Snapshots on Skills of Young Adults
 How did the PIAAC literacy and numeracy skills of 16- to 24-year-olds correlate with their education and work status in 2017? Over the summer, NCES released new snapshots showing the literacy and numeracy proficiency levels of young adults by their education and work status. The snapshots can be found here.
PIAAC Cycle 2 Assessment Frameworks
 The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has published The Assessment Frameworks for Cycle 2 of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. These frameworks provide the background necessary to understand the skills assessed by PIAAC and interpret the results of the study. They define and describe the literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills assessed in PIAAC and explain the relationship between PIAAC Cycle 2 and previous assessments of these skills over the last two decades.
NCES PIAAC Website Updates
As we approach the release of the PIAAC Cycle 2 results, check for updates on the NCES PIAAC website. These updates include the What PIAAC Measures page, featuring new information on Cycle 2 measures, a new Background Questionnaire (BQ) page, and updated pages for the Schedule and Plans, Data Files, and FAQs.
PIAAC Cycle 2 Results Session at COABE 2025 Conference
 The Coalition on Adult Basic Education (COABE) conference will take place in Dallas, Texas, from March 30 to April 2, 2025. At the conference, AIR will present a session titled “PIAAC 2023 Reveals New Findings on Adult Skills in the U.S. and Around the World”.
The session will provide an overview of new features in the second cycle of PIAAC, including the financial literacy survey, a separate assessment for adults with the lowest numeracy skills, and a new adaptive problem-solving assessment. Presenters will then compare adult skill results over the past decade, including the 3 years of the COVID-19 pandemic, at both the national and international levels. This comparison will cover literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem-solving skills, as well as differences between young adults and older adults and the relationships between skills and factors such as gender, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, employment, nativity, and health.
Frequently Asked Questions About PIAAC
Question: Can PIAAC proficiency levels be aligned with or equated to grade levels?
Answer: The PIAAC skills results (i.e., proficiency levels) do not specifically correspond to measures such as grade levels at school. The PIAAC proficiency levels have a use-oriented conception of competency and focus on describing what types of tasks adults at each level can typically do and their ability to apply information from the task to accomplish goals they may encounter in everyday life; for example, identifying a job search result that meets certain criteria. PIAAC is not designed to measure specific outcomes of schooling, including what students would be expected to learn in a particular grade or skills they would be expected to have mastered before progressing to a higher grade level, such as the ability to read or comprehend a particular text or use certain subskills like alphabetics and vocabulary. Additionally, grade-level equivalents may be unsuitable for characterizing the skills of adults, who often have uneven skill development across different areas.
While NCES, as well as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which coordinates the PIAAC study internationally, does not have an official mapping between proficiency levels and grade levels at school, the PIAAC proficiency levels are defined clearly and there is information to help one better understand them. A general overview of the literacy and numeracy proficiency levels and what adults at different levels can do is available here (in the Reporting and Interpreting Estimates section of the FAQ). A more detailed description of what adults at each of these proficiency levels can do—and the types of tasks that adults at these proficiency levels can successfully complete—is available in the NCES PIAAC Literacy section here. Example items for various proficiency levels, which could help one to understand these levels, are available in the Sample Items section on the NCES What PIAAC Measures page or in the Sample PIAAC Tasks presentation from the Outreach Toolkits on the PIAAC Gateway website.
Find more PIAAC FAQs.
Did You know?
In 2017, there was no significant difference in the average PIAAC numeracy scores between adults who had served in the armed forces and those who had not. Adults who answered “yes” to serving in the armed forces (7 percent of the population) had an average score of 257, while those who answered “no” (93 percent of the population) had an average score of 253.
NOTE: The PIAAC numeracy scale ranges from 0 to 500, but for the purposes of this graph, the scale is shown only up to 300.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), U.S. PIAAC 2017.
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