Cross-cultural differences in teaching strategies, opportunities-to-learn and achievement in reading

Using the PISA 2009 data from 43 education systems, the present study aimed at exploring to what extent is reading achievement of 15 year-olds explained by variations in reading curriculum. Factorial analyses have been performed on the “reading for school” (RFS) variables. Four factors were extracted; configural, metric and scalar invariance were checked for, showing that configural and metric invariance were met, whereas scalar invariance was not.
Correlations in each country were then computed between the 4 RFS factors and reading achievement score. Finally, Multi-level analyses were used to estimate the school and student level variance in reading achievement explained in each country by the 4 RFS factors and the students’ socioeconomic and cultural background. Two of the factors (interpretation of literary texts and use of non-continuous texts) were positively related to reading achievement and one (use of functional texts) was negatively related to reading in most of the countries. Interestingly, the factor Traditional literature course was negatively linked with achievement in many countries, but positively related to reading in a number of Asian countries.
The multilevel analyses showed that more than half of the between-school variance on average could be explained by the RFS factors (uniquely or jointly with background variables). The between-school variance explained by the RFS factors was larger in tracked educational systems, suggesting that curricular variations in the language courses linked to tracking might have an impact on reading even if reading is not usually taught as a specific subject to 15-year-olds students.