MAPPING JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ FUNCTIONAL LITERACY COMPETENCE

Literacy issues have probably been a special concern of many countries. In Indonesia, there have also been several surveys regarding the literacy of school students. This study aims to map the functional literacy competence of junior high school (JHS) students by focusing on various types of literacy competence and how each of them contributes to the overall functional literacy competence. This quantitative survey research involved 246 junior high school students from four regencies and one municipality of the Special Region of Yogyakarta as its sample. The research instrument was an extension of the National Assessment for Adult Literacy (NAAL) with some additions of functional literacy types suggested in the focus group discussion. Data were collected by using a test and subsequently analyzed through descriptive statistics and confirmatory factor analysis using the structural equation model with Lisrel. The results revealed that the functional literacy of the JHS students was mostly in the “medium” (83.3%), “low” (15.4%), and “high” (1.2%) category. Of the 15 types of literacy, two of them (13.33%), namely prose and cultural literacy made “high” contribution to the functional literacy as a whole, and two others (document and environmental literacy) also supported to a “medium” extent (13.33%), while the rest (60%) were categorized as having “low” contribution that means cannot be retained as factors that give significant contribution to the functional literacy competence. This likely implies the importance of fostering various types of functional literacy at school for students to have the ability to develop their personal and social functions.