Exhibit 2.5 contains the description of comprehension skills and strategies demonstrated by fourth grade students at the High International Benchmark. At the High International Benchmark, students demonstrated that they could locate and distinguish information embedded in dense text; make inferences to explain relationships and reasons; interpret and integrate events and information across text; and evaluate language features and textual elements.
Exhibits 2.5.1 through 2.5.10 contain examples of the types of items successfully answered by students achieving at the High International Benchmark, including two based on the literary text “Flowers on the Roof,” four based on the literary text “Macy,” and four based on the informational text “The Green Sea Turtle’s Journey” (see Appendix H). Each exhibit shows achievement results for the countries that participated in PIRLS (and also the PIRLS Literacy countries for “Flowers on the Roof), with up and down arrows indicating a significantly higher or lower percentage of success than the international average. The reading purpose, comprehension process, and scale anchoring description are provided above the item. For multiple-choice items, the correct response is indicated. Constructed response questions were worth 1, 2, or 3 points. Each constructed response item is shown with an illustrative student response and the amount of credit awarded the response is shown across the bottom of the exhibit, usually full credit.
Based on two constructed response items from “Flowers on the Roof,” Example Item 2.5.1 shows that students reaching the High International Benchmark could infer the significance of a character’s action and Example Item 2.5.2 that they could give a partial interpretation of a character’s feelings. Example Item 2.5.3 illustrates the kinds of information students were able to retrieve from the “Macy” passage, and Example 2.5.4 shows they could recognize the reason for a character’s action. In Example Items 2.5.5 and 2.5.6, students demonstrated that they were able to integrate events across the story to predict a character’s behavior and to describe a central idea in the story.
Example Items 2.5.7 and 2.5.8 show that when reading “The Green Sea Turtle’s Journey,” students were able to reproduce explicitly stated details from dense informational text. They also were able to make an inference to provide two explanations (Example Item 2.5.9). Perhaps most interesting, in Example Item 2.5.10, students at the High International Benchmark were able to evaluate the content of the diagram to interpret its meaning.
