In general, the results are bad. student The Spaniards scored 521 points in the latest edition of PIRLS, which is seven less than in 2016. Spain is 12 points below the average of all OECD countries, seven points behind the EU average, And far from the first position. 40 reading comprehension points is roughly equivalent to one school year.
And if that wasn’t enough, Only 6% of all Spanish students scored higher than 625, which is equivalent to an advanced level (There are four levels: very low, low, intermediate, high, and advanced). The average percentage of students excelling in reading reaches 11% in the OECD and 8% in the European Union.
It’s amazing Countries that have a similar predicted average score to Spain receive a higher percentage of excellent students, Like New Zealand (11%) and Germany (8%).
Top performing countries
Middle In countries with better overall results, the percentage of students at advanced levels in reading increases even more. In Ireland their share is 27%; in Northern Ireland, 23%; and in England and the United States, 18%.
opposite of this, The percentage of students at very low levels—not even reaching 400 marks—is 5% in Spain, which is slightly below the OECD average (6%) and similar to the EU as a whole (5%). This group has the worst reading comprehension, with Spain doing better than countries with similar estimated average scores: New Zealand (10%) and Germany (6%).
Spain, one of the fairest countries
The PIRLS shows how the higher the socioeconomic and cultural level of the student’s families, the better their scores in all countries. But this rule is not always followed by Spain, which stands out as one of the fairest countries among those analyzed. With a difference of 62 points, it is below, for example, Finland (67 points), Norway (69 points), or France (80 points). The countries with the greatest inequality are Turkey (117 points) and Bulgaria (122 points).
Similarly, the gap in performance between girls and boys is much smaller in Spain than in the EU as a whole (girls get only two points higher on average than boys). (11 points higher than the average score for girls) and the OECD average (13 points higher for girls).
ancestry from almost all countries
Spain’s seven-point decline in PIRLS between 2016 (528 points) and 2021 (521) breaks an upward trend that began in 2011 (513). This drop is not just for Spain. Between the 2016 edition and the 2021 edition, the OECD average also broke with the upward trend it had been experiencing since 2006, and suffered a decrease of the same order of magnitude as Spain, going from 541 to 533 points. Was.
The impact of the Covid pandemic may explain this general decline, As this affected the normal functioning of the schools and consequently, the learning process in most of the countries.
the study observes that a Correlation between the timing of school closures as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and performance decline, with a decrease of 0.11 points per school day of closure. In Spain’s case, of the roughly seven points that decline overall performance, nearly five would be explained by the closure of schools for 45 school days. According to the report, Spain has been one of the OECD countries with the fewest number of days its centers have been closed, with available data. Education at a Glance 2022 From OECD.
