Reading Literacy of Russian Fourth-Graders: Lessons from PIRLS‑2016

Galina Zuckerman - Doctor of Sciences in Psychology, Leading Researcher at the Psychological Institute, Russian Academy of Education. Address: 2 Mokhovaya Str., 125009 Moscow, Russian Federation. E-mail: galina.zuckerman@gmail.com Galina Kovaleva - Candidate of Sciences in Pedagogy, Head of the Center for Assessment of Education Quality, Institute for Strategy of Education Development, Russian Academy of Education. Address: 5/16 Makarenko Str., 105062 Moscow, Russian Federation. E-mail: galina_kovaleva_rao@mail.ru Viktoriya Baranova - Researcher at the Center for Assessment of Education Quality, Institute for Strategy of Education Development, Russian Academy of Education. Address: 5/16 Makarenko Str., 105062 Moscow, Russian Federation. E-mail: vikjur@mail.ru Among the key concepts of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), reading comprehension processes are identified as the most operational, because they can serve as a basis for new teaching practices and new tools to assess academic achievements. The concept of reading processes, which is the focus of this article, has one more advantage: reading processes are defined in the PIRLS terms as universal and good for understanding both literary and informational texts. The PIRLS‑2016 test demonstrated that the reading literacy of Russian fourth-graders was far superior to that of their peers from fifty other countries. An item-by-item comparison of Russian fourth-graders' answers to the test questions with the average PIRLS‑2016 results proves that Russian primary school graduates can interpret and integrate ideas and information extracted from a text much better than they can retrieve explicitly stated information from the same text. Determining the strongest and relatively weak points in the reading comprehension processes of Russian fourth-graders' is required in order to unleash the educational resources that are not currently used and consequently to improve reading literacy at every stage of education.