Learning Strategies Explaining Boys’ and Girls’ Reading Performance in Schools with Different Language

Abstract

Reading literacy is considered to be an essential life skill, but the large-scale international studies report a worryingly high number of those struggling with reading. The struggling readers tend to have certain background characteristics such as male gender or low socioeconomic status, but some countries also express concern about schools with different language performing on a lower level. Wishing to improve students’ reading performance, it is necessary to study the possible disadvantaging factors alongside with the enhancing ones. In the current paper the impact of learning strategies on reading literacy performance was analyzed, gender and school language aspects being taken into account, to discover the sources of the variation in students’ reading literacy performance on student and school level. Multilevel modeling methods were used to analyze PISA 2009 students’ reading literacy test results and their awareness of learning strategies in Finland and Estonia. It was discovered that in both countries students’ awareness of learning strategies explained about one third of school level variation and about one fifth of student level variation. Learning strategies appeared to play an important role in explaining the differences in students’ reading test results not only on individual level, but students’ results depend on school they go to.