Background: While highlighting is one of the most common strategies to enhance reading comprehension, little is known about how highlighting behavior and its relationship with performance varies across cultures. Our purpose was to examine whether the use and the success of highlighting prevalence, quantity, and task relevance vary internationally.…

Engagement in digital reading assessments has been underexplored in spite of its importance for assessment and instructional design. In this study, we used different engagement indicators in two ePIRLS tasks (n[subscript 1] = 14,324, n[subscript 2] = 15,026) to identify engagement profiles, and interpreted them using the three-dimensional model of…

Background: Providing a rich home literacy environment (HLE) is considered to contribute to the development of students' reading comprehension. However, less research attention has been given to the underlying mechanisms that influence this relationship, including potential mediating characteristics. The present study aims to assess whether…

Background: Reading and reading comprehension are crucial skills, yet many students in grade 4 struggle with them. To address this, several instructional practices have gained popularity. For one, explicit reading strategy instruction (ERSI) is deemed useful, given the finding that successful readers tend to employ reading strategies. As a second…

For years, educational practitioners and decision-makers have encouraged teachers to implement a balanced literacy approach in class. However, the effects of balanced literacy on the reading comprehension of students from different backgrounds have not been carefully examined in the current literature. Using the large data sets from the 2016…

Using machine learning, this research aimed to examine the crucial factors that predict the reading performance of fourth-grade students from Türkiye who participated in PIRLS 2021. When trained with the data of 3589 fourth-grade students and their 405 independent variables, the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm properly distinguished between…

Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is a large-scale assessment that measures how effective countries are in teaching reading literacy. Conducted every five years since 2001 (with Australia participating since 2011), PIRLS provides information about how to improve teaching and learning so that young students become…

Background: Proficient reading skills are crucial for Foundation Phase learners to develop critical thinking and problem-solving abilities. The 2021 PIRLS assessment highlighted alarmingly low reading proficiency among ten-year-olds. Effective reading instruction, and a positive reading environment are essential for developing confident, skilled…

This paper informs users of data collected in international large-scale assessments (ILSA), by presenting argumentsunderlining the importance of considering two design features employed in these studies. We examine a commonmisconception stating that the uncertainty arising from the assessment design is negligible compared with that arisingfrom the…

Purpose: We investigated the roles of leisure reading and word reading ability in vocabulary and reading comprehension development in 598 adolescents at ages 10, 11, and 12 (285 girls, 313 boys). Method: Structural equation modeling was used to test whether word reading was associated with vocabulary and reading comprehension: a) directly; b)…

The reading literacy skills of Australian adolescents, as measured in successive PISA waves, have declined since 2000. Literacy achievement is not low by international standards, but it is lower in Australia than it is in Anglophone countries with which we compare ourselves, e.g. Canada. Using PISA 2018 and PIRLS 2021 data, we investigated both…

This report outlines the results of the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) in England. PIRLS is an international comparative study directed by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. The aim of PIRLS is to assess and compare the reading performance of pupils in their fourth year of…

The study examined the relationships between self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies used by 2,894 bilingual primary school students and their Chinese and English reading test performance. Exploratory factor analysis of the self-reported SRL strategy use questionnaire yielded two factors of strategies (planning and monitoring) used in both…

This study aimed to employ machine learning techniques to uncover the pivotal determinants influencing the reading proficiency of fourth-grade students across 65 regions, as participants in the PIRLS 2021 assessment. The primary objective was to discern and assess key factors at the student, family and school levels that predict high and low…

In international large-scale assessments, students may not be compelled to answer every test item: a student can decide to skip a seemingly difficult item or may drop out before the end of the test is reached. The way these missing responses are treated will affect the estimation of the item difficulty and student ability, and ultimately affect…