The IEA Study of Reading Literacy

Many different views exist about the best way to teach children to read, yet little is known about which countries are the most successful in this aim, or what the most productive strategies are for doing so. This report addresses these issues by building on the pioneering work of Robert Thorndike in 1973. Data are presented on the relative achievement levels of comparable samples of students in each of 32 school systems in all continents of the globe - making it the largest IEA study to date. Attempts are made to elucidate the reasons for the differences that were found and implications are drawn about the likely effects of different policies. Many advances have been made since the previous IEA reading survey, students were asked to tackle a wider range of reading exercises, prodigious efforts are made to minimise any cultural or linguistic biases, and the statistical machinery of the Rasch model was systematically used, for the first time in IEA surveys, both to help identify troublesome items and to create defensible international scales.
Greater efforts are made in this study to assess the volume and character of students' reading, to explore their beliefs about learning to read, and to compare the effects of teachers' beliefs and instructional emphases on student achievement. Within each country specific findings have emerged which will give policy makers pause for thought and prompts for action.