Reading Recovery is a first-grade literacy intervention program with notable short-term benefits, but there are sustainability studies that highlight inconclusive evidence of its enduring success. It was unclear if formerly enrolled Reading Recovery students continue to have long-term literacy skill retention after exiting the literacy…

The PISA 2009 results for Ireland indicated a large decline in reading literacy scores since PISA 2000 (the largest of 38 countries). The decline in mathematics scores since PISA 2003 was the second largest of 39 countries. In contrast, there was no change in science achievement since PISA 2006. These results prompted detailed investigations into…

The aim is to describe the development of achievement in compulsory school in the Nordic countries from the 1960s. The study relies on published results concerning literacy and numeracy from the international large-scale assessments between 1964 and 2012. Among others, the following conclusions are drawn: (1) for most countries, a small but…

This presentation is devoted to four main topics: (1) the comparative performance of U.S. adults and high school students on international literacy assessments; (2) the literacy/numeracy proficiencies of the nation's adults in different educational groups and among those who recently participated in federally-funded adult education programs; (3)…

Focusing on the problems of validity and representativeness of samples, a study examined the history of literacy in the United States since 1880 in order to set the contemporary debate on test scores, literacy and reading performance in the longer-range perspective of the last 100 years. The quality of the data and the arguments of literacy…

Surveys of literacy attainment have been going on in the United Kingdom since 1948. The main finding is that literacy standards have changed very little in that time. Among 8-year-olds (children in Year 3) in England and Wales, however, standards fell slightly in the late 1980s, and then recovered in the early 1990s. The few international…