The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) has been monitoring international trends in reading achievement among fourth-grade students for 25 years. As a critical point in a student's education, the fourth year of schooling establishes the foundations of literacy, with reading becoming increasingly central to learning across all…

The aim of this study is to propose advantages provided by computerized tools when assessing reading ability. A new computer-based reading assessment evaluating both word reading and reading comprehension processes was administered to 687 children in primary (N=400) and secondary (N=287) schools. Accuracy (weighted scores) and speed of access…

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an international comparative study of student performance in reading literacy at the fourth grade. PIRLS 2016 marks the fourth iteration of the study, which has been conducted every 5 years since 2001. New to the PIRLS assessment in 2016, ePIRLS provides a computer-based extension to…

The Internet has become the primary source for obtaining information at work, at home, and for school. Because Internet reading increasingly is becoming one of the central ways students are acquiring information, in 2016, PIRLS was extended to include ePIRLS--an innovative assessment of online reading. ePIRLS is a computer-based assessment that…

Reading difficulties in school are very challenging for teachers due to many different reader subtypes in one and the same class. Moreover, there are few easy-to-use tools enabling teachers to assess reading ability. According to the Simple View of Reading (Hoover and Gough in "Reading and Writing", 2(2), 127-160, 1990), efficient…

In this Forum article, Komatsu and Rappleye report that the results of PISA 2015 released December 2016 revealed a major oddity: reading scores in several of the "leading" East Asian countries had apparently plummeted. An interesting point is that Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong are among the most advanced technological societies in…

Little attention has been paid to the question about generality versus modularity of the learning potential (LP). The main research question of our study was: Is the students' LP established with the help of a dynamic assessment of their English as a foreign language (EFL) oral proficiency general enough to predict their subsequent EFL reading and…

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a system of international assessments that allows countries to compare outcomes of learning as students near the end of compulsory schooling. PISA measures the performance of 15-year-old students in science, reading, and mathematics literacy every 3 years. PISA uses the term…

"Methods and Procedures in PIRLS 2016" documents the development of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) assessments and questionnaires and describes the methods used in sampling, translation verification, data collection, database construction, and the construction of the achievement and context questionnaire…

Although International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement-pioneered international large-scale assessment (ILSA) of education is now a well-established science, non-practitioners and many users often substantially misunderstand how large-scale assessments are conducted, what questions and challenges they are designed to…

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an international assessment of student performance in reading literacy at the fourth grade. PIRLS measures students in the fourth year of formal schooling because this is typically when students' learning transitions from a focus on "learning to read" to a focus on…

Monitoring educational development in the early years of schooling is vital if practitioners, and policy makers, are to support students' learning, but the assessment of student achievement in developing countries can be a logistical headache. Maurice Walker reports on an innovative approach to assessment using tablets that is addressing that.

Anagram solution tasks have been frequently used to assess word recognition processes and relevant research suggests that anagram solution ability is closely related to reading. Recently, the anagram paradigm was utilized to compare reading performance in the Greek language and was found to share significant positive correlation to reading…

Canada's knowledge-based economy--especially the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)--continues to grow. Related changes in the economy, including shifts to globalized markets and an emphasis on innovation and technology, all mean that education is more and more an integral component of economic and social well-being.…

The number of countries that regularly participate in international large-scale assessments has increased sharply over the past 15 years, with the share of countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment growing from one-fifth of countries in 2000 to over one-third of countries in 2015. What accounts for this…