A central objective of schooling processes at the international level is reading skills development. Unfortunately, many students in the European Union underperform at this, and these low performances can be more pronounced in countries with lower Human Development Index (HDI) values. This study analysed the contextual effect of school…

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…

PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) is the fourth assessment in the current trend series, following PIRLS 2001, 2006, and 2011. There were 61 participants in PIRLS 2016, including 50 countries and 11 benchmarking entities (e.g., regions of countries as well as additional grades or language groups from the participating…

In the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, the Flemish community of Belgium outscored its French community in reading, with low achievers accounting for a large proportion of the score gaps. In this study, between-community comparisons based on the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method showed that the Flemish community benefits…

The analyses presented in this report indicate that in several Member States (MS) 15-year-old students in vocational-oriented programmes (VET) perform better in digital reading than in print reading in PISA 2012. When differentiated by programme of study--VET versus general education programmes--VET students perform better in digital than in print…