The contribution of teacher practices to reading literacy in Serbia – Lessons we missed from PISA 2009

Abstract

The main focus of this paper is the relationship between the teachers’ practice in Serbian language (reading) classes and student achievement on PISA tasks. Specifically, in an effort to examine this relationship, we focused on the link between the students’ PISA achievements and the strategies teachers use to engage the students during the reading tasks in order to structure and scaffold the work on those tasks. This two-part study relied on a mix-methodology combining quantitative and qualitative analyses. The data from the quantitative study was analyzed using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) with student and school level. The results indicated that the students have the best achievements when teachers motivate student in engagement reading and sparingly those intended for structuring and scaffolding the work on the reading tasks. The data from the qualitative analyses revealed the most useful strategies teachers and students identify and whether they recognize in their classes those strategies that were included in PISA questionnaire.