preliminary studies from the national assessment of adults intelligence ( naal ) , launched 15 january 2005 by the us national centre for education rankings , indicate benefits and lost in communication across minority adults between 1992 and 2003 . the nationally syndicated experiment across us children age 16 and older found the over - all average paragraph and document literacy still relatively untouched , but vernacular comprehension improved 8 points ( on a profile of 500 . ) reports among men were inconsistent , with white and asian / pacific islander minorities score substantially higher than hispanic or dark ethnicities ; hispanic boys in particular had sharp increases in prose and document literacy ( - 9 % and - 8 % , also ) and quantitative mortality remained constant with 50 % of subjects grading at other than basic literacy levels .
The National Assessment of Adult Literacy is a project held by the US National Center for Education Statistics.