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The only way to increase a learner’s capacity in reading and writing is to increase the amount of time they practice those tasks and ensure that best-practice learning methodologies are being applied. However, this comes at a cost of not learning something else that may be more valuable to the learner in the long-term. The problem is exposed if we look at the PIRLS103 report below for the top 20 nations.
Resource 27: PIRLS international reading benchmarks
Implications of the Lack of Fluency
What the PIRLs report identifies is that the 10th best-performing country out of 48 countries, New Zealand; had only 14% of learners’ reading at an advanced level of reading and only 45% in the advanced-high range. The results from the countries lower down are worrying, and what this report is saying is that less than half of all the readers are fluent, and that was for a country rated 10th out of 48! As educators, we are aware of this in our classrooms every day but we tend to ‘pretend’ that this is not happening.
These graphs and tables demonstrate quite clearly that rote learning testing systems (standards) are a useless barometer of success as they will always plateau after teachers consistently apply best practice, and this usually occurs after 4-5 years of standards being introduced by governments. In this regard standards have a value in developing best practice but the considerable amount of additional amount of time that schools are spending on reading, writing and mathematics to achieve this plateau comes at a considerable cost.
There is a tendency for the general-public to assume that because a school is achieving the ‘standard’ in reading, writing and mathematics they are also achieving the standard in Science, the performing arts, health & wellbeing, the arts, the social sciences, technology as well as the competencies and creating an understanding of the learning process itself. This is an assumption that has no validity. As schools rush to achieve ‘standards’ the amount of time learners spend in all the other domains has reduced dramatically and the public is not complaining!
Educators and communities often judge intelligence by how well a person can read and write and can apply memorised mathematical processes, which is the major focus for most schools over the first five years of schooling. After 4-5 years of standardised testing, no improvement is seen in test results beyond the margins of error of the surveys, as the US data earlier displayed. In that example, there has been no significant change in capacity in mathematics and reading over the 40 years that the testing process has been running for the 17-year-olds. This is also true for standardised testing in the UK, Australia and New Zealand as all have plateaued and those results cannot increase unless additional time is put aside for more reading, writing and mathematics.
103 PIRLS 2011 International Results in Reading (2011). The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. [PDF]. Retrieved from http://timss.bc.edu/pirls2011/downloads/P11_IR_FullBook.pdf
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