Functional literacy as a measure of intelligence: new empirical evidence

Abstract

The study aims to explore the potential for interpreting the results of functional literacy tests in terms of intelligence assessment. The research involved 150 first-year university students from Moscow, aged 17 to 21 years (M = 18.71; SD = 2.14), of whom 72% were female. Functional literacy was assessed using items from the open bank developed within the framework of the "Monitoring Student Functional Literacy" project, and non-verbal intelligence was measured using Raven's Progressive Matrices. The findings suggest that the operational definitions of functional literacy and intelligence exhibit a high degree of semantic similarity. It was also demonstrated that the functional literacy data fit better to the bifactor psychometric model, and the general factor (g-factor) derived from it shows a moderately strong correlation with non-verbal intelligence as measured by Raven's Progressive Matrices. Overall, the results indicate that functional literacy measures can be interpreted in terms of general intelligence factor.