Difficulty of Reading Comprehension and the Proficiency of the Grade 10 Students of Aloran Trade High School, Philippines

Abstract

In the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Philippines ranked the lowest among the 79 countries participating in the assessment. This study aimed to determine the proficiency of the grade 10 students at Aloran Trade High School and the difficulty of reading comprehension. The instruments used in this study were adapted reading materials from PISA assessments with questions needing subjective answers, categorized according to the different comprehensions proposed in Barrett’s Taxonomy. The researchers collected data from 40 grade 10 students who were selected randomly using a random sampling technique. Item analysis (item difficulty and item discrimination) and descriptive analysis (mean and standard deviation) were used to analyze the data. After tabulating the data gathered, the researchers determined that the students have low proficiency in reading comprehension. Furthermore, no comprehension has an easy difficulty with the proficiency of grade 10 students. Literal and reorganizational comprehension have moderate difficulty, while inferential and evaluative comprehensions are difficult among the students. These imply that students need to be proficient in understanding a text’s explicit and implicit information. It is therefore recommended that interventions be made to address this issue.