2016 PIRLS results

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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2016 PIRLS results

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

I've posted about England's improvement in the 2016 PIRLS assessments here:

http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewto ... ?f=9&t=924

How did Australia and other countries do?
The Progress in International Reading Study (PIRLS) ranked Australia 21 out of 50 countries among Year 4 students. This is up from a ranking of 27 when the last study was done in 2011.

Singapore and Russia were the stand-out international performers in reading, the study found.

Northern Ireland, England, Ireland and Poland were all in the top band of performance.

Australia fell in the middle band, along with the USA and Canada, but outperformed other countries including France, New Zealand and Spain.

However, it was not all good news. The study also found that among students in the low-performing 20 per cent, Australia's progress has remained stagnant.

See http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-05/a ... ng/9228454
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: 2016 PIRLS results

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Sadly, the results for New Zealand (home of the infamous Reading Recovery) are a disaster! From the New Zealand Herald:
Kiwi children's reading levels have dropped to their lowest level on record - and this time it is well-off Pākehā (white) students who have plunged the most.

The latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), the first since the creation of national standards in 2010, shows that New Zealand has slipped 10 places from 22nd out of 41 countries in 2011 to 32nd out of 50 last year.

Australia, Austria, Lithuania, Slovenia and Spain have all overtaken New Zealand, and five new countries with children reading above NZ levels have come into the survey for the first time.
Professor James Chapman who has studied the research projects of Reading Recovery in great depth over many years has this to say in a current discussion about New Zealand's 2016 PIRLS results:

Indeed! It’s appalling. The NZ Reading Recovery website continues to boast the following falsehood:
The aim of Reading Recovery is to prevent literacy difficulties at an early stage before they begin to affect a child's educational progress. Providing extra assistance to the lowest achievers after one year at school, it operates as an effective prevention strategy against later literacy difficulties. Nationally, it may be characterized as an insurance against low literacy levels.

The claim is demonstrably false.

The drop in PIRLS results for NZ is not surprising because the fundamental approach to literacy instruction remains unchanged. Roughly 85-90% of NZ schools use phonics programmes in a variety of ways according to data from two recent surveys we have undertaken involving a large sample of teachers (n=974). Over 50 named phonics programmes were mentioned in the surveys. However, other observational research we have undertaken suggests that teachers don’t know how to effectively use phonics in their literacy instruction, and tend to clip phonics on to whole language methods. And Reading Recovery with its instructional approach now 30 years out of date, pays minimal lip service to phonics and the development of word decoding skills.

Despair…
Professors Chapman and Tunmer and Dr Arrow have written a very challenging joint press release regarding the 2016 PIRLS results for New Zealand, see here:

http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewto ... 1759#p1759
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: 2016 PIRLS results

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Phonic boom in young student reading skills

• The Australian
• December 5, 2017
• REBECCA URBAN

Primary school student literacy has improved significantly following the introduction of a national curriculum that em­phasises the teaching of phonics, but almost one in five children still fail to meet the minimum reading standard for their age.

The situation is more dire for indigenous students, with 43 per cent falling below the benchmark set by an international test of reading. And boys continue to lag behind girls.

The latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which measures the reading ability of more than 580,000 Year 4 students worldwide, reveals Australia has edged up the international rankings, from 27th of 45 participating countries in 2011 to 21st out of 50 last year.

While Australia continues to lag behind literacy leaders Russia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Ireland, it has overtaken Canada, Germany, Slovenia, Israel and New Zealand.

Eighty-one per cent of Australian students were at or above the intermediate benchmark — the agreed proficient standard for Australia — while 35 per cent were achieving the high benchmark. In 2011, 76 per cent of Australian students were classified as proficient readers, a disappointing result that prompted education experts to question teacher training standards and the quality of teaching in the classroom.

Experts said it was difficult to identify the precise reason behind the improved result but pointed to a renewed focus on early literacy and the use of phonics to teach reading as the national curriculum has been rolled out in the past few years.

The results are likely to add impetus to the federal government’s push for a phonics check in the first year of primary school. A meeting of state education ministers will hear a proposal on the plan on FridayThe Australian Council for Educational Research, which published a report on the results coinciding with their international release overnight, welcomed the overall improvement, noting that it was consistent with NAPLAN reading results. But it was concerned by the “20 per cent of ... students reading at or below the low benchmark”, including 6 per cent who did not even reach the low benchmark.

“While the average reading score for Australia (544 points) was significantly higher than that of Kazakhstan, Portugal, Spain, and Flemish-speaking Belgium, each of these countries had significantly lower proportions of their students fail to reach the low benchmark than did Australia,” the ACER report noted.

ACER deputy CEO Sue Thomson said the results highlighted a particular groups of students for whom reading comprehension remained an area of great difficulty.

She said the number of Australian students classified as “poor readers”, meaning they had failed to achieve the low benchmark, was relatively unchanged since 2011. “In addition, significant achievement gaps by gender, indigenous status, socio-economic background and school location remain,” Dr Thomson said.

The study found 16 per cent of boys were poor readers, compared with 11 per cent of girls. Among students from an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander background, 18 per cent were poor readers, compared with 4 per cent of non-indigenous students. While Australia’s overall average score had recorded a 20-point, “statistically significant” increase, the average indigenous score rose slightly.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham said the result was encouraging but educators and policymakers had to stay focused on boosting student outcomes.

He said the government had taken a “root and branch” approach to lifting student outcomes by improving teaching quality and teacher-training standards, and ensuring the curriculum was decluttered and refocused on core skills.

Centre for Independent Studies senior research fellow Jennifer Buckingham, who chairs a government-appointed panel that has recommended phonics checks for all primary school starters, said the results represented a big improvement on average but the high number of lagging students were a serious concern.

Among the states, WA, Queensland, NT, Victoria and Tasmania all recorded more students at or above the intermediate benchmark than in 2011.

Undurba State School principal Kylie Smith described the Queensland school’s approach to teaching literacy as “relentless”. From grade prep, students receive explicit instruction in decoding strategies and comprehension, as well as phonics.
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: 2016 PIRLS results

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Editorial in The Australian:
Reading the riot act is working

For decades, The Australian has campaigned for renewed emphasis on teaching the basics — reading, writing and numeracy — as part of a more rigorous and better-quality school curriculum. The public, especially parents, has been dismayed by our students’ poor showing in international testing. It is encouraging, then, that Australia’s Year 4 students have made significant headway in the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study that tested 580,000 children in 50 countries last year. Australia was ranked 21st out of 50. That position leaves plenty of room for improvement, but exceeds the 2011 outcome when we ranked 27th out of 45. Of 6431 students tested in 286 Australian primary schools last year, 80 per cent met the international benchmark score, compared with 76 per cent five years ago.

Much of the improvement, as Education Minister Simon Birmingham said yesterday, stems from decluttering the curriculum to better focus on the fundamentals and the greater use of phonics in teaching reading. Phonics — teaching children to relate letters to sounds and to blend sounds into words — is a key building block of early reading. While widely shunned for years in favour of “whole word recognition’’ that left many students unable to read by the time they reached secondary school, phonics is a tried and tested method, with the weight of evidence behind it.

Over the past decade, the extra $10 billion poured into recurrent education funding and Labor’s wasteful $16.2bn Building the Education Revolution failed to arrest the slide in our education standards. If the PIRLS study — the first tangible sign of widespread improvement for many years — is to be built upon, the Turnbull government cannot afford to waste the additional $23.5bn it has earmarked to spend in schools over the next decade. The Gonski 2.0 review, established to ensure the extra money is directed to evidence-based initiatives proven to boost results, will be vital.

While much depends on teacher selection and training, classroom discipline must also be addressed. In March, an analysis of the latest Programme for International Student Assessment by the Australian Council for Educational Research found Australian students were among the worst behaved in the developed world. Surveys have identified widespread problems caused by disruptive, unruly behaviour and classroom noise, making learning difficult. As national education correspondent Rebecca Urban reports today, it remains a serious concern that the PIRLS testing shows Australia continuing to trail Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, England, Russia, Finland and Poland in reading. Nor can education authorities ignore the fact that boys are falling behind girls and that many indigenous children are continuing to struggle. Emulating the world’s best systems through evidence-based methods is the way forward.
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: 2016 PIRLS results

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: 2016 PIRLS results

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

'Food for thought' NFER blog post regarding England's context:

https://thenferblog.org/2017/12/05/pirl ... ching/amp/
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: 2016 PIRLS results

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Blogger Greg Ashman comments on the 2016 PIRLS results - particularly with regard to Australia's results compared to England's:

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2017/1 ... ment-10288
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: 2016 PIRLS results

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ABC World Today provides a brief radio-audio on PIRLS results in Australia featuring the wonderful Anne Castles (who managed to mention the Phonics Check) and reporter Natasha Robinson (who mentioned the DDOLL letter):

http://www.abc.net.au/radio/adelaide/pr ... ng/9231646

More about the DDOLL letter shortly.
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: 2016 PIRLS results

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Dr Jennifer Buckingham writes a very informative piece in The Conversation about the 2016 PIRLS results in Australia:
International study shows many Australian children are still struggling with reading
https://theconversation.com/internation ... ding-88646
The results of an international study into the reading skills of Year 4 students offer reason for optimism for Australian children.

The latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) shows that, on average, reading achievement among the Australian children surveyed improved significantly between 2011 and 2016. This is excellent news.

However, there is still cause for concern about Australia’s literacy standards, with the PIRLS study showing that a substantial minority of Year 4 children continue to struggle with reading.
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: 2016 PIRLS results

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Professor Pamela Snow writes an important blog post with regard to the language and literacy levels of those in custody in light of the protestors of the phonics check:
Can we talk about high-stakes failure?
http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewto ... 1761#p1761

She includes a link to Alison Clarke's analysis of the 2016 PIRLS results for Australia.
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