How Teaching Practices Affect Reading Literacy: A PISA 2018 Investigation on Southeast Asian Countries

Motivated by the role of teaching in what has been described as the “black box” of learning, the study problematizes the link of three individual teaching practices – direct instruction, adaptive teaching, and feedback – to student achievement in reading literacy in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Through a secondary analysis of PISA 2018, multiple regression models were fit to investigate the association between reading scores and measures of teaching practices reported by 35,000 students. The results showed a unique positive relationship between direct instruction and reading literacy in the Philippines, negative in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Adaptive teaching related to higher reading literacy scores in all countries while feedback related to lower scores in all countries but Thailand. The findings have significant implications on the repositioning of these teaching practices in the Southeast Asian classroom, where the study asserts an imperative to close the gap between national policies on student-centered approaches and the persistence of traditional methods.