Children's Text Reading and Comprehension Skills Improve: Zhanna Andreasian

“A lot has been discussed regarding the reading and comprehension abilities of 10-year-old children in the education sector, otherwise known as functional literacy,” writes Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports, Zhanna Andreasian.

“The Education Inspection Body conducts annual studies among more than 800 children to assess their capabilities in silently reading and understanding, analyzing, and making conclusions about artistic and popular science texts. Texts of medium complexity are selected. The comparison of the results from 2022 and 2023 shows that the average percentage of children's evaluation results has increased by about 10 percent; if in 2022 it was 53.5%, in 2023 it rose to 63.8%, which indicates that children's abilities to read and comprehend texts are improving. Furthermore, more than half of the children recorded results above 64.3%—meaning they correctly answered at least 9 of the 14 questions related to the texts they read.

It is very important that the number of children with insufficient results has decreased by about 20 percent compared to 47 percent in 2022, becoming 28 percent in 2023. The sample also includes schools from Tavush, where fourth graders were already undergoing new criteria in 2023, and where the results are more positive than other schools.

I consider it very important that the popular science texts for fourth graders are not significantly harder to access than artistic texts. It is equally important that children do not struggle to articulate their thoughts, as comparable results have been recorded for both short-answer questions and multiple-choice questions. The report is available on the Education Inspection Body's website as part of the quarterly report, and it will be fully published alongside the 2024 annual report.

By the way, I would like to mention that we have revised the rules for school olympiads and plan to also hold a reading olympiad for the 5th and 6th grades from now on.” We remind you that in 2023 it was announced that 33 percent of 10-year-olds in Armenia have literacy problems; after four years of school attendance, they remain illiterate.