Dr. Phil on education: what the evidence says · JRE #1889
SUBJECT: EDUCATION
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
she says 130 million Americans can't read at the most basic level and I said define basic level for me and she said basic level is they can't read a prescription label
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The 130 million figure traces to U.S. Department of Education adult literacy surveys (the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey and its 2003 successor, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy), which found that roughly half of U.S. adults scored in the combined "Below Basic" and "Basic" prose literacy categories, a total consistent with a figure in that range. However, those categories are defined by a range of everyday reading and comprehension tasks, such as following simple written directions or locating information in short texts, not specifically by the ability to read a prescription label. Separate peer-reviewed research on prescription label comprehension, including a 2006 study of 251 patients at a public hospital clinic, found that patients with low literacy were about 3.4 times less likely to correctly interpret prescription drug warning labels, but this research measured a specific clinical skill in a small sample and was not the source of the 130 million national estimate. As stated, the claim conflates a broad, decades-old national literacy statistic with a narrow and different definition (reading a prescription label), producing a figure that is not directly supported by the underlying survey data.