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Gender and Education for All
THE LEAP TO EQUALITY |
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| Box 2.10. Literacy Assessment and Monitoring Programme (LAMP) | |
LAMP seeks to specify what literacy is and to improve its measurement, in order to inform policy-making at the national and international level, and to support the design of literacy programmes.
Most national literacy statistics, such as those used in this report, are based on a mix of self-declarations and on educational attainment proxies. These measures can be unreliable. Declaration by an individual or by a household head is subject to bias, and many children complete primary school without acquiring the ability to read.
Furthermore, some of these statistics are based on the current UNESCO definition that literacy is the ability to read and write, with understanding, a short simple statement relate to one’s daily life. However it is now recognized that the concept of literacy embraces a continuum of skills, in a variety of dimensions, at different levels of mastery and for different purposes. Indeed, is a person who can only sign literate? What about someone who is familiar with medication names but who struggles with reading a short story?
LAMP will build a broader notion of literacy. It will develop a methodology, currently being tested in a small number of countries, to measure skills directly through assessments. It aims to provide participating countries with literacy data of high quality. Using a framework of five levels of mastery, LAMP is compatible with the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) that has been undertaken in industrialized countries. This common framework is intended to become a world standard for literacy assessment.
However, this standard differs from the current ‘dichotomous’ measures . imposed by the data presently available . by which people are designated literate or illiterate. Given the change in methodology it will not be possible to make direct comparisons between LAMP results and current data. Retrospective estimates will be used to assess the progress of the participating countries against Goal 4. But comparisons with countries not using the LAMP methodology will require even more caution.
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Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics www.uis.unesco.org.
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