In 2010, the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) conducted a preliminary study to determine the feasibility of mapping the performance levels of the international Adult Literacy and Life Skill Survey (ALLS) to those of the Australian Core Skills Framework (ACSF) using a Delphi technique (Circelli, Curtis, Perkins, 20111 ). In that study, a small number of adult literacy and numeracy experts used their professional judgement to qualitatively align a sample of ALLS items to the ACSF levels. At the completion of the study, there was general consensus among the participants that:
• the mapping process was feasible for the:
o Reading domain of the ACSF to the ALLS prose and document literacy domains; as well as the
o Numeracy domains of the two frameworks.
• a larger-scale research study should be undertaken to empirically align the two frameworks onto a single scale for each of the two domains (i.e., Reading and Numeracy).
The National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) commissioned Victoria University (Shelley Gillis) in conjunction with Educational Measurement Solutions (Margaret Wu and Mar k Dulhunty) to undertake the larger-scale research study
