Hot off the statistics lab: First in-depth analyses of Luxembourg secondary school students’ basic reading competencies

Test results of the national school monitoring programme Épreuves Standardisées (ÉpStan) reveal a very low level of reading competency for the majority of 5e students (9th graders) attending the Enseignement Secondaire Générale – Voie de Préparation (ESG-VP) school track. As a matter of fact, in 2023, the majority of ESG-VP students could not master ÉpStan Niveau 1 in reading comprehension (80% in German, 72% in French; cf. https://dashboard.epstan.lu), meaning that they struggle to read simple and short texts (MENFP 2008; Sonnleitner et al. 2018). Thus, most of ÉpStan reading tasks are highly challenging for ESG-VP students, which leads to the following research question: how to better adapt a curriculum-anchored reading test to better reflect the German and French reading abilities of students attending this particular track?
In the current pilot-study, we would like to put a spotlight on ESG-VP students’ reading performances by extending and adapting the ÉpStan reading comprehension tests in both languages on the lower end of the competency scale. In the first part of our presentation, we will give insights into how we defined three distinct levels of basic reading competency for German and French, supported by an in-depth linguistic analysis on items with differing theoretical and empirical difficulty levels. In the second part, we will show how we applied Diagnostic Classification Models (DCM, cf. von Davier & Lee, 2019), in order to cognitively differentiate between several groups of readers with varying degrees of reading competency. The conclusion will be dedicated to reflections on how we could report our findings back to the students in the future.

Preliminary results are promising: in both languages, we find empirical evidence for three distinct difficulty levels of basic reading competencies.