SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, May 16. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The reading performance of fourth-year primary students in the Canary Islands between 2011 and 2021 remains stable, according to the results of the ‘International Study for the Progress of Reading Comprehension (PIRLS) 2021’, published this Tuesday.
In this decade there has been an improvement of five points, which, although not very significant, occurs in an educational context that has suffered from the covid-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Education of the Government of the Canary Islands highlighted in a note.
Likewise, if the countries that have participated in these two waves (those of 2011 and 2021) are taken as a reference, it can be seen that there are more numerous that register a worsening of reading competence, according to the report prepared by the Canary Islands Quality Agency University and Educational Evaluation (ACCUEE) from this document.
Likewise, it is perceived that the repetition of the course is not an effective measure in the development of reading comprehension.
In this sense, in the 2021 study, the reading performance of repeating students in fourth year (457 points) is clearly lower than that of students who do not repeat (514).
In addition, the proportion of repeating students between 2011 and 2021 has decreased from 13.1% to 5.7%, but the difference in scores between repeaters and non-repeaters remains constant, so this decrease is not due to the devaluation of reading requirements for course advancement.
On the other hand, the differences between publicly owned and privately owned centers in the Canary Islands have been reduced between 2011 and 2021. Currently, the score for public centers is 504 and 532 for privately owned centers.
In addition, there are hardly any differences between native and immigrant students, according to the ACCUEE, since in 2021, the average for migrant students is 513.6 points compared to 501.9 for the islands.
The Canary Islands participate in this edition with an extended sample of 50 centers and 958 students, chosen at random, and in 2011 they also participated in the same way, which allows evaluating the evolution of the Canary system.
At the national level, Spanish students in the fourth year of Primary School –9 years old– have worsened seven points, to 521.
Spain is ranked 21st along with New Zealand in this fifth edition of the study, the results of which were published on Tuesday, May 16, and reflect a downward trend in performance due to the pandemic.
The data in this report, to which Europa Press has had access, have been compiled during Covid-19 with the participation of 57 countries, some 400,000 students, 380,000 parents, 20,000 teachers and 13,000 schools.
In this report, which is the equivalent of PISA for Primary, Singapore leads the table with 587 points, followed by Ireland (577), Hong Kong (573), Russia (567) and Northern Ireland (558), while in the last places are South Africa (288), Morocco (372), Egypt (378), Jordan (381) and Iran (413). Egypt is the country that has improved the most (48), while Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have lost the most points (32).
The report has revealed that two thirds of the countries that have participated have registered a drop in the average performance in reading between 2016 and 2021, which suggests that the pandemic has had a general negative impact on this aspect.
In the case of Spain, which has participated since 2006, 8,551 students from 452 educational centers have been evaluated and a result has been obtained in the average performance in reading that represents a drop of seven points, drops similar to those of Slovakia (-6 points) and Portugal (-8) and below most countries, such as Germany (-13 points), Finland (-17) or Israel (-20).
In addition, Spain’s 521 points are below the total for the European Union (EU) and the OECD average (533).
The study also observes a correlation between the time in which schools have been closed as a result of the pandemic and the drop in performance, with a decrease of 0.11 points per school day of closure, so that in the case of Spain, of the almost seven points that global performance falls, about five would be explained in this way by the closure of schools for 45 school days.
Another of the most significant results of the study is that the female students (522) present a higher performance than the male students (520) in reading comprehension, although the difference by Spanish sex is one of the lowest in the participating countries.
SOCIAL CONTEXT AND CENTERS
On the other hand, performance is partly conditioned by the social, economic and cultural context of the students: the higher the level, the better the scores in all the countries. In Spain, however, this difference is one of the least important in the study (62 points), below Finland (67 points), Norway (69 points) or France (80 points). Among the countries with the greatest inequalities are Turkey (117 points) and Bulgaria (122 points).
The report also details that only one in ten Spanish primary school students do not like to read and one in five does not feel safe in this practice, and delves into the time that these students spend using digital devices to search and reading information on a school day: 25% spent more than 30 minutes, 57% this time or less, and 18% did not spend even a minute.
On the other hand, it places Spain among the countries with the highest percentage of Primary school students with a high sense of belonging to their school (73%), while in the whole of the European Union the percentage is 56% and in the average of OECD countries the is 57%.
In this sense, it reflects that a high sense of belonging to the center positively affects performance, since the difference between the mean scores of students with a high sense of belonging and those with a low sense of belonging is 26 points in the case of Spain (28 in the EU total and 33 in the OECD average).
In addition, 81% of Spanish teachers state that they are very satisfied with their profession, the highest percentage in the OECD and EU countries that participate in the study.
