PIAAC is an initiative of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that assists governments in assessing, monitoring and analysing the level and distribution of skills among their adult populations as well as the extent of skills use in different contexts.
PIAAC is initiated by the OECD based in Paris, France.
PIAAC is managed by an international consortium of experts and organisations in different fields including education, assessment and questionnaire design, sampling design, research analyses, skills, survey operations, IT management, linguistics, etc. The PIAAC Consortium laid out specific standards and guidelines to the whole process of conducting this study to ensure the survey design and implementation processes of PIAAC yield high-quality and internationally comparable data.
In Singapore, PIAAC is implemented by the Institute for Adult Learning, with support from the Ministry of Education (MOE), Ministry of Manpower (MOM) and the Singapore Workforce Development Agency (WDA).
Round 1 (2008 - 2013) | Round 2 (2012 - 2016) |
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1. Australia 2. Austria 3. Belgium 4. Canada 5. Cyprus 6. Czech Republic 7. Denmark 8. Finland 9. France 10. Germany 11. Ireland 12. Italy 13. Japan 14. Korea 15. Netherlands 16. Norway 17. Poland 18. Russian Federation 19. Slovak Republic 20. Spain 21. Sweden 22. United Kingdom 23. United States 24. Estonia |
1. Greece 2. Indonesia 3. Israel 4. Lithuania 5. New Zealand 6. Singapore 7. Turkey 8. Chile 9. Slovenia |
1 The analysis for the United Kingdom (UK) is done separately for England and Northern Ireland, and hence the comparison across 33 countries reflects 34 economies.
PIAAC is administered under the supervision of trained interviewers either in the respondent's home or in a location agreed between the respondent and the interviewer. After the sampled person is identified, the survey is administered in two stages:
Both components can take about 60-90 minutes to complete.
The direct assessment component of the survey evaluates the skills of adults in three fundamental domains:
These domains constitute "key information processing skills" for adults with the following consideration:
They provide a foundation for the development of other, high-order cognitive skills and are prerequisites for gaining access to and understanding of specific domains of knowledge.
Proficiency in these domains is considered as a continuum of ability involving the mastery of information-processing tasks of increasing complexity. The results are represented on a 500-point scale divided into levels. Each proficiency level summarises what a person with a particular score can do. Six proficiency levels are defined for literacy and numeracy and four for problem solving in technology-rich environments.
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The participation of Singapore at the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) has shown that our young adults performed well as compared to their global peers from 33 other economies, particularly in their proficiency in problem solving in technology rich environments, numeracy and literacy skills.
The results reflect the progress Singapore has made in education and skills training over the years.
For more details on the study outcome for Singapore, please refer to the media release(PDF,0.5MB).
The International Data Explorer (IDE) is an online tool that allows users to create statistical tables and charts to explore adults' performance in PIAAC by country, demographic characteristics, social and linguistic background, education, use of skills and employment status. Click here to access IDE.
PIAAC public-use data can also be found in an international database, which contains all information collected through the international PIAAC instruments. Public Use Files (PUF) containing individual unit record data in SAS, SPSS and Excel format are available for downloading.
To download the Public Use files and for more information about OECD Public Data and Analysis, please visit here.
Click here(Excel,0.4MB) to download the International Codebook.
Click here(Word,93KB) to download the Derived Variables Codebook.
For the online version of PIAAC assessment please visit here.
For a demo version of the assessment (6 background questions; 3 literacy, 3 numeracy and 1 problem solving in technology-rich environments items), please visit here.
For country-specific materials on PIAAC, please visit this link.
For PIAAC publications released by OECD, please visit this link.