{"id":15568,"date":"2022-02-15T10:28:17","date_gmt":"2022-02-15T10:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/impulseducacio.org\/?p=15568"},"modified":"2023-03-02T11:17:01","modified_gmt":"2023-03-02T11:17:01","slug":"reading-comprehension-an-indicator-of-school-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/impulseducacio.org\/en\/reading-comprehension-an-indicator-of-school-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading comprehension, an indicator of school success"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading comprehension, an indicator of school success<\/h1><\/h1><\/div>
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15 February 2022<\/p>\n<\/div>

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PISA and other studies show that reading comprehension significantly influences academic results<\/h2><\/h2><\/div>

By Jordi Viladrosa i Clua<\/p>\n<\/div>

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The results of international PISA<\/a><\/span> assessments always generate diverse and sometimes controversial interpretations. In 2018, assessing the reading comprehension skills of 15-year-old students was a priority Catalonia’s average score (484) in this skill is lower than the EU one (489) and the OECD (487) but higher than that of the Spanish (477). Taking the trend of the previous editions into account – PISA 2009, PISA 2012 and PISA 2015- the scores for this competence had remained remarkably stable at values close to 500 points and with a varied range of about 3 points. Thus, the drop of 16 points in this edition compared to the last one in 2015 is striking in most countries (specifically the OECD countries lose 6 points) and the Spanish average drops by 19 points. Another not minor detail is that Catalonia has 20.5% of students in the low proficiency level, Spain 23.2%, the EU 21.6% and the OECD as a whole 22.7%.<\/p>\n

These evaluation reports help us to study the relationship between academic performance and socio-demographic, social, economic and educational variables. However, they are therefore indicators that need to be contextualised and interpreted with caution. In any case, we can affirm that the origin of the students, the level of education of their parents or the socio-economic and cultural index, to name but a few, are relevant factors that educators and educational administrators should not ignore. It is important to note that the linguistic model used by PISA for its tests is a functional rather than a grammatical-traditional one. Therefore, the starting point is the text rather than the sentence. This should be born in mind because the teaching model chosen by language teachers and the type of assessment they use may influence the results obtained and the type of learning that predominates.<\/p>\n

Why is reading comprehension essential?<\/h3>\n

Reading comprehension is the skill that enables us to grasp what we read, whether we are referring to literal comprehension or whether it is necessary to infer meanings in a figurative sense or outside the immediate context. Getting this process right should make it possible for us to discover the structure of the text, to see how the ideas are linked, distinguishing the main ideas from those that are secondary or incidental. Understanding the author’s intention will also be necessary; we can interpret it, although this is not always possible.<\/p>\n

There is now strong evidence that a good command of reading comprehension skills is a prerequisite for success in the areas and subjects of the education system. The mastery of skills including finding, selecting, interpreting, integrating and evaluating information from all types of texts is a determining factor.<\/p>\n<\/div>

There is now strong evidence that a good command of reading comprehension skills is a prerequisite for success in the areas and subjects of the education system<\/h6>\n<\/div>
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Too often, we have perhaps given priority to “training” the speed at which we read; remember that the usual reading rate is 240 words per minute. However, if we are interested in readers having a good understanding of texts, it is better to look at reading fluency and decoding. That is the ability to glide over the words with a certain degree of automatism to free up the working memory and thus understand what we are reading. This type of reading is what should be worked on in the classroom. Let us not forget that reading consists of several components: phonology and phonetics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. All of them have their weight in the overall result. Let us also bear in mind that reading regularly influences reading comprehension and the acquisition of new vocabulary, which has a lot to do with learning the different curricular subjects.<\/p>\n<\/div>

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Reading regularly influences reading comprehension and the acquisition of new vocabulary, which has a lot to do with learning the different curricular subjects<\/h6>\n<\/div>
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The teacher Cristina Zuriaga in her proposal Living Library Project<\/em><\/a><\/span> advocates a school library that functions as a driving force for transformation and learning in all areas, thus contributing, as the evidence confirms, to the improvement of reading comprehension.<\/p>\n

Juan G. Fern\u00e1ndez, in a blog<\/span><\/a> post, states: “Reading fluency is easy to describe when we listen to our students reading aloud in class. Fluency also allows us to include elements of intonation, volume and pause that fit in with what is being read”. To assess this aspect, he proposes the following rubric:<\/p>\n<\/div>

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Source: https:\/\/investigaciondocente.com\/2021\/10\/09\/crg-una-vision-cientifica-de-la-lectura\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>

Understand what we read<\/h3>\n

The results of the TIMMS -2019<\/span><\/em><\/a> report (an international assessment study on mathematics and science conducted on children in the 4th grade of primary school) show that school failure in non-language areas is very closely connected to reading comprehension. “Reading comprehension of a text occurs due to the reading skills used. Once the decoding process is automated, comprehension takes place according to each reader’s skills: attention, memory and inference come into play. Every dimension must be attended to and trained in a school context and even in a family context”, says Mar\u00eda Isabel de Vicente Yag\u00fce Jara. She provides the keys to improving reading comprehension in her presentation at the International Congress on Reading Comprehension for Children and Young People (CICLIP<\/span><\/a>) She starts from the fact that international assessments focus on retrieving information (a memory process), understanding in a general way and interpreting, supported by attention, and reflecting and evaluating, understood as inference.<\/p>\n

Teachers must consider all these aspects because, depending on the methodology, understanding the offered content in class will be more or less meaningful. For example, suppose a teacher assumes that all students unequivocally understand the specific vocabulary of their teaching subject. In that case, they will make progress in the didactic unit, but some students may fall behind due to a lack of understanding of the concepts. Mathematical terminology is not the same as scientific vocabulary or the vocabulary of the human sciences. Care must be taken to ensure that words are contextualised and that the most appropriate meaning is chosen if we want to ensure that everyone makes an accurate and proper interpretation of the meaning of the words.<\/p>\n

Classroom ideas<\/h3>\n

We find Juan Cruz Ripoll’s keys for the classroom very illustrative. Synthetically, they are as follows:<\/p>\n