National literacy study was to investigate 18-year-old students’ ability to accept life and career challenge, grasp the knowledge quickly, and communicate and cooperate with others. NAER has established the national literacy project office to set up the subject scope, indices, and assessment framework. Five subjects were included, they were Mandarin, English, Math, Science, and Digital. We have finished the pilot study in 2014, for 2015 and 2016, we worked on writing and revising test items. In 2016, a total of 9480 high school and vocational high school students were tested and 9163 subjects had completed the test.
To understand the literacy performance of 18-year-old students, this study analyzed the variables including school, gender, education level of parents, self-expectation, learning to learn attitude, and homework time. The results showed that female students outperformed male students and senior high performed better than vocational high school students. Also female students demonstrated better motivation, interaction and altruism attitude than male students. Students' academic performance had positive relationship with parents' education level and self-expectation. Those spending more time on homework also performed better.
For policy suggestions, first, adaptive counseling should be emphasized, and proper learning strategy should be provided based on the characteristics of students such as male students and vocational high school students. Secondly, school curriculum and instruction should adopt literacy defined as shown in this study in order to empower students. The report is based on the 2016 test results. To know more about the research design, sampling process, analysis process, assessment framework, standard setting and item quality analysis of this project, please read 2016 technical report.
