Assessment as Support Measure for Luxembourg's educational "Low Achievers" - How Students with Severe Reading Difficulties could benefit from data of the National School Monitoring Programme

Much has been written about the fact that the Luxembourg school system – similar to the German (Stanat et al. 2022) – doesn’t offer the same educational opportunities to all children. The most vulnerable group are boys living in households with a low socioeconomic status, in which none of the three main languages of instruction (Luxembourgish, German, and French) are spoken (Backes & Hadjar 2024). As a result, many of them attend the vocational preparatory school track Enseignement Général - Voie de Préparation (ESG-VP; to a certain extend comparable to the German “Hauptschule”), where they are taught at their own pace in successive learning modules (MENFP 2009; MENFP 2020).
Nevertheless, data from the national school monitoring programme Épreuves Standardisées (ÉpStan) show a dramatic shortage of reading skills in this school track. In fact, in 2024, the vast majority of ESG-VP students (81% in German, 72% in French) did not master the lowest curriculum-based level of reading competence (cf. https://dashboard.epstan.lu). This means that they are struggling even with very simple and short texts (Sonnleitner et al. 2018) and are placed below the current ÉpStan measurement range. Clearly, a more detailed description and analysis of these “low achievers” in reading is needed.
Therefore, this study aims at extending and adapting the ÉpStan reading comprehension tests in both languages on the lower end of the competence scale. In the first part of our presentation, we will give insights into how we defined three distinct levels of basic reading competence for German and French, which are also reflected in our empirical data. 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 competence.
The conclusion will be dedicated to reflections on how to communicate our findings in the best way – or in other words, how assessment data could support students in their learning process.