Understanding the strategies of document literacy and their conditions of use.

The relative difficulty of document reading-to-do strategies and how these strategies combine with different structure and processing conditions as contributors to task difficulty were examined. To accomplish this, the extent to which different types of strategies and their related structure and processing conditions would influence difficulty on 217 tasks drawn from the document scales of five national adult surveys was investigated. The study identified a difficulty hierarchy of strategies. When combined with 4 predictor variables (i.e., document complexity, type of information, type of match, plausibility of distractors), strategy types accounted for 80% of the variance in task difficulty. A new framework for conceptualizing and measuring the document reading-to-do task domain is discussed, and the advantages of this framework for researchers, test designers, curriculum developers, and document designers also are considered.