Assessment of Reading in International Studies

Jenny Lenkeit works at Potsdam University, Germany, and conducts research concerned with Educational Effectiveness, International Large-Scale Assessments, and Inclusive Education.Knut Schwippert is Full Professor for Educational Empirical Research at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He works in the context of large-scale school comparison studies, in which he deals especially with issues concerning the relationship between migration background, social status, and educational success.

• Introduction – Doing research with international assessment studies: methodological and conceptual challenges and ways forward 1. Addressing omitted prior achievement bias in international assessments: an applied example using PIRLS-NPD matched data 2. Distributional properties of the PIRLS-home resource for learning scale and observed effects on reading achievement: are measurements of educational inequalities by latent indices without bias? 3. Configurations of multiple disparities in reading performance: longitudinal observations across France, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom 4. Understanding language in education and grade 4 reading performance using a ‘natural experiment’ of Botswana and South Africa 5. Can test construction account for varying gender differences in international reading achievement tests of children, adolescents and young adults? – A study based on Nordic results in PIRLS, PISA and PIAAC 6. Improving international assessment through evaluation