PIRLS is one of the largest educational studies assessing the reading comprehension skills of pupils in the fourth year of school education. We invite you to learn about the process of preparing and conducting the study.
The latest edition of PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) involves over 60 countries and regions from around the world. The first two editions of the PIRLS study in Poland (in 2006 and 2011) were conducted by a team from the Central Examination Board. The Educational Research Institute – National Research Institute is responsible for subsequent studies, which are conducted on behalf of the Ministry of National Education.
International procedures
High-quality data and internationally comparable results are achieved through the use of rigorous, standardized research procedures that are applied in all countries participating in the study. These procedures are prepared and consulted by experts from an international research consortium and national research teams. In practice, this means that there are international procedures and requirements for each stage or element of the study – from defining the study population, the research sample, the level of response among respondents, through the development of research tools and the design of the tools themselves, information materials, rules for organizing the research session, to the rules for coding, entering, and verifying data. The linguistic and substantive adaptation of these materials is the responsibility of the national research teams.
Interactive form of the study
The organizers of PIRLS make every effort to ensure that the study is attractive to its participants and corresponds as closely as possible to the natural environment in which the pupils function. The latest edition of the study will take advantage of the possibilities offered by digital resources, with pupils working on specially prepared computers. The tasks they will solve will involve reading texts that imitate web pages or display interactive graphics. This will allow us to assess the extent to which respondents have mastered the skill of reading and interpreting text in a digital environment. Until now, countries participating in the study have been able to conduct it using traditional paper-based or digital tools. Poland will conduct the entire study in a digital environment for the first time.
Representative sample
PIRLS is conducted on representative samples of pupils in each country and region participating in the study. This allows conclusions to be drawn about the entire population under study, i.e., all fourth-graders in a given country, based on a randomly selected group of pupils. Any deviations from accepted international standards and indicators are analyzed in detail and recorded in research reports. National research teams are involved in preparing the sample design, while the sample of schools participating in the study is randomly selected by an international research consortium. The use of specialized sample selection procedures not only allows for representative results of pupil achievement in a given country, but also enables international comparisons and observation of changes over time.
Reading comprehension
The main objective of PIRLS is to assess pupils’ reading skills and their comprehension of the texts they read. These skills are measured by preparing, for each edition of the study, an appropriate number of literary and informational texts, as well as sets of questions and tasks relating to these texts. Experts from each country analyze the proposed texts in terms of their suitability for the socio-cultural context, linguistic conventions, the specific nature of the education system, as well as their suitability for the cognitive abilities of children of a given age and their attractiveness to pupils from different parts of the world. They also jointly develop questions and tasks for pupils and code keys to analyze pupils’ answers and perform further statistical work.
Improving the education system
Thanks to the broad scope of the study, the data collected from many countries, and the possibility of making international comparisons, PIRLS is an important source of information on the functioning of education systems. Publicly available research reports and databases allow for independent, in-depth analysis of important aspects of school education, including the attitudes and opinions of pupils, parents, teachers, and school directors.
Preparations for the ongoing edition of the PIRLS 2026 study began in 2023, and the entire project will be completed with the announcement of the results at the end of 2027.
We invite you to familiarize yourself with the survey schedule, which is available on the website of the International Research Unit’s website.