Pixel International Conferences

The Romanian students’ reading results in the PISA 2018 assessment did not bring a spectacular shift in the trend of the last decade: Romania continues to score below the EU average and below its Eastern European neighbours’ levels. While the data from previous cycles were not extensively reported to the wider public, in December 2019, when the results were released internationally, the Romanian Ministry of Education organized a press conference. The published figures were met with highly negative emotions and a fierce attack against the new national curriculum for lower secondary education. But could the official curriculum be the culprit? It had only been implemented at grade 5 level (11 year olds) when the 15 year olds took the PISA test! Where does the reading issue come from, then? Our paper analyses the PISA 2018 data in order to identify the students’ specific problems in reading with the aim to capitalize on the poor results to innovate for better learning outcomes. Our methodology consists in isolating the items with the highest and the lowest scores in the Romanian database and thus identify the reading processes and the item typologies that appear to be difficult for our students. Next, we compare these processes and respective PISA assessment tasks with the Romanian curriculum provision and the reading practices. Finally, we conclude on how to improve the latter on the basis of the evidence PISA offers. Our team promotes enhancing the students’ motivation with meaningful reading texts and contexts while supporting teachers to leave behind the academic grammar – literature approach in reading practices.

Keywords: Reading practices, motivation for reading, language curriculum, teacher education.

References:

• Mullis, I. et al. (2012), PIRLS 2011 International Results in Reading
  https://timssandpirls.bc.edu/pirls2011/downloads/P11_IR_FullBook.pdf
• Noveanu, G. et al (2013), A Methodological Guide on How  to Improve the Reading Competences (in Romanian), Bucuresti: EDP
• OECD 2019, PISA 2018 (2019), Assessment and Analytical Framework https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/b25efab8-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/b25efab8-en
• OECD, PISA 2018 Database (2019) https://www.oecd.org/pisa/data/2018database/
• The Romanian Curriculum, grades 5-8 (2017) (in Romanian), București: Ministry of Education http://programe.ise.ro/Portals/1/Curriculum/2017-progr/01-Llimba%20si%20literatura%20%20romana%20materna.pdf
• The Romanian Curriculum, grades 9-10 (2009) (in Romanian), București: Ministry of Education