Use and Impact of PIRLS
Lithuania participated in IEA’s PIRLS in 2001, 2006, and 2011. Prior to the inaugural PIRLS 2001, Lithuania participated in TIMSS in 1995 and 1999, but PIRLS 2001 was the country’s first large scale reading literacy study. The Ministry of Education and Science and the National Examinations Center (the institution responsible for the Matura and basic school leaving examinations) also were responsible for implementing PIRLS 2001. At the outset of PIRLS 2001, the examination system had just undergone reform, with the centralized national examinations having been introduced at the high school leaving or university entrance level; a culture of assessment was growing in the country, basic analysis of the results of the Matura examinations were beginning to be conducted and disseminated, and ideas about other assessment possibilities (e.g., diagnostic tests and national assessments) were being shared. Given the timing, PIRLS had both a direct and indirect impact on the development of these processes. This means it is possible to describe the changes over time in average reading proficiency based on readers’ characteristics and to compare reading proficiency levels of different age groups.
The positive results of PIRLS 2001 came as a pleasant surprise to the Lithuanian educational community. Lithuania performed well, which may be one of the reasons people listened to and disseminated the results. Lithuania’s results in PIRLS were slightly lower in 2006 and 2011 but were discussed widely with more extensive secondary analyses and widely disseminated conclusions. The results influenced changes in the curriculum and in textbooks used for teaching reading, along with familiarizing language educational specialists with the PIRLS assessment framework. In 2015, PIRLS 2011 results and recommendations led to changes to the preprimary curriculum and the design of new methodological tools to improve reading skills in the primary grades. All this had an impact on current primary education policy changes. The description of primary education programs was approved by the Minister of Education and Science in December 2015, and the revised Lithuanian language curriculum for primary education was approved in January 2016.9 Students in Grade 1 began following the new curriculum in September 2016, and since September 2017 Lithuanian language development has been held under the new programs in all grades of primary education (Grades 1 to 4).