UNDERSTANDING THE STRATEGIES OF DOCUMENT LITERACY AND THEIR CONDITIONS OF USE

The relative difficulty of document reading-to-do strategies and how t hese strategies combine with different structure and processing condit ions as contributors to task difficulty were examined. To accomplish t his, the extent to which different types of strategies and their relat ed structure and processing conditions would influence difficulty on 2 17 tasks drawn from the document scales of five national adult surveys was investigated. The study identified a difficulty hierarchy of stra tegies. When combined with 4 predictor variables (i.e., document compl exity, type of information, type of match, plausibility of distracters ), strategy types accounted for 80% of the variance in task difficulty . A new framework for conceptualizing and measuring the document readi ng-to-do task domain is discussed, and the advantages of this framewor k for researchers, test designers, curriculum developers, and document designers also are considered.