The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) studies the cognitive and workplace skills of adults in 24 countries to determine how well they can participate in a 21st century society and global economy. Due to the volume of data and their many policy and programmatic implications, trained researchers from multiple disciplines were needed to interpret the findings.

AIR and the Educational Testing Service are partnering on a three-year training project focused on building the capacity of the U.S. research community to utilize the new data sets and tools from PIAAC. The goal of the project is to stimulate vitally needed educational research on adult skill development and lifelong learning, with the resulting research leading to improved adult education and training policies and programs that will help to enhance the social welfare of individuals and increase U.S. economic productivity and global competitiveness.

The project is training 160 researchers from the fields of adult education, labor economics, public health, criminology, and lifelong learning. The training provided through this project will deepen researchers' expertise in PIAAC in areas such as conceptual and measurement frameworks, survey and background questionnaire design, assessment design and instruments, data set structure, and analytic techniques.