Checking the Possibility of an International Comparative Study of Reading Literacy Assessment for Children Starting School

The early years of school, when a child is only learning to read, are critically important for later development and learning. Cross-cultural comparative assessments of reading literacy provide a rich source of data for researchers, practitioners and politicians on the opportunities and prospects of early childhood development in different countries, circumstances and contexts. There are few publications of this sort available, and none of them has involved Russian-speaking children on entry to school so far. Data obtained using two language versions of the International Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (iPIPS) on representative samples of first-graders from the Republic of Tatarstan and Scotland is used to compare the early reading assessment results between children starting school in countries with linguistic, cultural, and school entry age differences. Two studies are conducted to analyze the possible methods of comparing assessment results of children from different countries in the absence of a common measurement scale. The first study uses the rank-ordering method to establish a correspondence between the levels of reading literacy among Russian and English-speaking children by expert judgment. In the second study, the obtained model of literacy levels is used to establish the cut-off scores (benchmarks) of student assessment outcomes.