Little by little, evidence is appearing that tries to shed light on the effect of the school closure caused by the pandemic. After the study that a few months ago argued that schools lost consciousness equivalent to a school term Due to the closure of schools, now it is the turn of the reading comprehension of fourth grade students: Spain suffered a “significant” setback in this indicator, according to the PIRLS international standardized test, and it remains below the average for both both the EU and the OECD.
Five facts about the impact of the pandemic on children and adolescents
Further
Spain obtains in the 2021 edition of PIRLS a score of 521 points (at the level of countries such as New Zealand or Portugal), which represents a setback compared to the ascending line that it brought from the previous study, in 2016. The drop is seven points , which, although it might seem slight, is enough to be considered an impact, according to the organization. With this score, our educational system is one more edition below the OECD (533) and EU (528) averages. Singapore, Hong Kong and Russia lead this table, which among European countries has England, Finland and Poland as the countries with the highest performance, with scores above 550.
The fine print of the study shows that in Spain there is considerable equality between boys and girls in reading comprehension (girls tend to do better in studies on educational aspects), that the country has few students who stand out above (have an excellent reading comprehension ) while it is below the average, it affects the thoughts, already well established, that the socioeconomic level is one of the main elements that determines the level of minors and attributes the drop in reading level to the pandemic.
The decline in the PIRLS score has been widespread around the world in this issue. Only three of the countries analyzed (Malta, Norway and Ireland) have improved their results. Eight have remained the same and 21, including Spain, have fallen. Consequently, the OECD average has also broken the upward trend it had been on since 2006.
Few high-performing students
PIRLS defines reading comprehension as “the ability to understand and use written language forms required by society and/or valued by the individual. Readers are able to construct meaning from a variety of texts. They read to learn, to participate in communities of readers at school and in everyday life, and for personal enjoyment. The test distinguishes between two purposes of reading (informational and literary) and schoolchildren perform similarly on both; in both categories our country appears below the OECD and EU averages.
Nor does it differ much from other comparative studies in that Spain is a fairly uniform country in terms of the performance of its students: there are not many excellent ones, nor are there many in the lower part. PIRLS establishes five performance levels: 6% of Spanish students are in the highest part, a figure “significantly” below the OECD, with 11%, and the EU, with 8%, which is ” striking” for the Ministry of Education because it is also located far from the countries with which Spain is compared in the overall result, New Zealand and Portugal. At the bottom, the results are more comparable: five out of every hundred students are in the lower category, a figure similar to that of the OECD (6%) and the EU (5%).
The authors of the report argue that the general drop in performance is linked to the school closures that caused the pandemic in 2020. To arrive at this statement, they have compared the days that schools were closed in each country with their performance in PIRLS. “In view of the linear regression between both data series, the main conclusion obtained is that the variation in the average return for each closing day (-0.11) is statistically significant, and serves to explain 28% of the observed variance”, reads the analysis carried out by the Ministry of Education. In the case of Spain, almost five of the seven points that have been left in this edition would be attributed, according to Education, to the closure due to a pandemic. Where the other two have been lost is not explained.
PIRLS also affects an aspect on which there is already a consensus in Education: the socioeconomic context explains to a large extent the success or not of a student in Education. Reading is no exception. To find out its impact, minors are asked about their conditions at home and a social, economic and cultural index (ISEC) is established, which in the case of Spain stands at 10.2, a value similar to that of France or Belgium and almost in the limit that marks the unfavorable conditions of the favorable ones, which is at 10. “It is observed that the higher the socioeconomic level, the better average scores in reading comprehension in all the selected countries,” says the report.
This indicator is also used to observe the equity of a country: students are divided into four groups based on their ISEC and the difference in performance between the most favored and the most disadvantaged groups shows the equality or inequality between them. In Spain that difference is 62 points, when the countries with the greatest difference exceed 100 (Bulgaria or Turkey) and the one with the least is Slovenia, with 60 points. “This indicates that Spain is one of the most equitable countries of those analyzed in this report.” Another thing is that it is equitable with low results.
Lastly, PIRLS shows some concern because only a third of the fathers and mothers of the families that have participated in PIRLS state that they like to read, when it has also been shown that this habit is transmitted from parents to children on the one hand and on the other influences the reading ability of minors.
