Attainment in reading comprehension of Maltese students participating in PISA 2009

Abstract

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures how students are performing in certain subjects at school in countries around the world. It’s run by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and assesses the knowledge and skills in mathematics, reading and science of 15-year-olds internationally. This paper focuses on students’ attainment in reading in Malta comparing how well they can read to other PISA 2009 countries and economies. This will include comparing mean performance levels on an overall reading scale and several reading subscales with other countries in the PISA 2009 study as well as the OECD and EU averages. An examination of the distribution of students across proficiency levels will also be provided to assess students’ performance in reading literacy. This chapter is more elaborate than preceding chapters since reading was the main focus of PISA 2009. This paper describes the PISA reading framework summarising the characteristics of the texts that are used in measuring reading literacy. These characteristics are grouped into five categories: text medium, format, aspect, type and situation. The subsequent sections provide descriptions of text characteristics that have differing demands of proficiency and compare student performance in reading across all participating countries. These sections also assess the mean performance in reading literacy of male and female Maltese students attending different school types. The final section identifies the relationship between socioeconomic background and educational achievement. Multilevel models will be used to measure the proportion of between-school variance in reading performance that is accounted for by socioeconomic factors and school governance.