Use and Impact of PIRLS

PIRLS has benefited all parties concerned with education in Morocco; it provides reliable, valid, and detailed data about Moroccan student achievement in reading literacy and, no less importantly, the educational environment within which they learn to read. Through PIRLS, Moroccan educationalists have gained deeper insights into ways to further improve reading literacy among Moroccan students on the basis of an international perspective.

Seven years ago, the National Center for Assessment, Examinations, and Orientation, in collaboration with the regional Academies of Education and Training, started to draw benefits from the results of PIRLS and the National Program for the Evaluation of Acquired Learning Outcomes (Programme National d’Evaluation des Acquis, or PNEA). They first organized nationwide seminars that were a good opportunity to disseminate data about Moroccan student achievement in reading and the various areas that need further attention, such as the following: inferring word meanings using the immediate and wider context, expressing opinions, understanding the writer’s mood or intent, and evaluating texts in terms of genre and content. The seminars also provided an occasion to urge those involved in education to develop projects to help students improve reading competency. Reading for pleasure was a major emphasis across these seminars. Within the framework of improvement projects, schools and parents were urged to set up libraries in schools to further foster reading literacy. For the same purposes, educators are expected to attend similar seminars around the results of PIRLS 2016. The 12 regional centers for assessment and examinations as well as the 82 provincial ones, within the framework of the so-called integrated projects, will be responsible for analyzing their regions’ data from PIRLS (and TIMSS) to design and implement action plans geared toward improving the quality of teaching and learning of reading (as well as mathematics and science).

In light of Moroccan student achievement in PIRLS 2006 and PNEA 2008, the Ministry of National Education and Vocational Training launched the Evaluation of Prerequisites program (L’Evaluation des Prérequis) in 2009. This diagnostic program, administered nationwide at the beginning of each school year, enables teachers to identify students’ areas of strength or areas needing improvement during instruction and according to each student’s learning pace. The program has been designed to meet multiple purposes:

Identify whether students master the key competencies and resources necessary to cope with the new language and reading curriculum
Enable teachers to identify student learning strengths and areas requiring improvement, with respect to instruction and individual learning pace
Help teachers implement remedial strategies on the basis of student results specifically geared toward students needing extra help, in groups or as individuals
Provide headmasters and school councils with reliable data to use in the development of improvement plans
Provide inspectors with data to direct teacher professional development sessions toward formative assessment and remediation
Build and sustain a culture of reading assessment

Within the framework of the assessment program, diagnostic tests are administered and scored at the beginning of the school year. Students with similar learning difficulties are grouped together, and specific remedial work programs are designed and implemented for these student groups. One of the major benefits of this program is that when teachers cannot easily resolve students’ difficulties, headmasters, inspectors, pedagogical advisors, and school management councils are called upon to develop a context-specific improvement plan to provide more extracurricular student support. In cooperation with Japan International Cooperation Agencyʼs (JICA) technical assistance, this program, which previously targeted only a few school levels, will have covered all the primary school levels by September 2017 and will tap the core competencies (languages, mathematics, and science).