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Home > Evaluating performance > More than a horse race: A guide to international tests of student achievement > Description of PIRLS Achievement Levels
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Description of PIRLS Achievement Levels

Lower Quarter PIRLS Benchmark (25th Percentile and above, Score 435 or above)

Reading for Literary Experience

Given short stories with one to two episodes of problem/resolution and essentially two central characters, students can:

  • Retrieve and reproduce explicitly stated details about a character’s actions and feelings presented through narration, description, or dialog.
  • Locate the relevant part of the story and use it to make inferences clearly suggested by the text.

Reading to Acquire and Use Information

Given a variety of short informational materials including text, maps, illustrations, diagrams, and photographs organized topically or chronologically, students can:

  • Locate and reproduce explicitly stated facts about people, places, and animals.
  • Locate the sentence with relevant information and use it to make inferences clearly suggested by the text.

Median PIRLS Benchmark (50th Percentile and above, Score 510 or above)

Reading for Literary Experience

Given short stories with one to two episodes of problem/resolution and essentially two central characters, students can:

  • Recognize and state relationships between events (e.g., why something happened) by inferring connections among clearly related sentences.
  • Recognize the overall message or effect of the story 
  • Identify elements of story structure including plot and character (e.g. narrator, role of major character, sequence of events, beginning/end)
  • Make elementary interpretations of a character’s actions and aims, drawing on different parts of the text.

Reading to Acquire and Use Information

Given a variety of short informational materials including text, maps, illustrations, diagrams, and photographs organized topically or chronologically, students can:

  • Make inferences to locate and extract or match explicitly stated information from text.
  • Locate the appropriate section of a leaflet containing text, tables, a map, and pictures, and extract some relevant information.
  • Give general reaction to the whole text, sometimes supported by a specific example.

Upper Quarter PIRLS Benchmark (75th Percentile and above, Score 570 or above)

Reading for Literary Experience

Given short stories with one to two episodes of problem/resolution and essentially two central characters, students can:

  • Contrast the actions, traits, and feelings of characters (e.g. describes how two characters are different).
  • Make inferences to explain relationships between intentions, actions, and events, and give text-based support.
  • Can begin to recognize the use of some language and textual features (e.g., personification, an abstract message).

Reading to Acquire and Use Information

Given a variety of short informational materials including text, maps, illustrations, diagrams, and photographs organized topically or chronologically, students can:

  • Extract specific information that is difficult to locate.
  • Make inferences based on connections across several sentences.
  • Provide interpretations based on integrating text-based information and their own knowledge and experiences.
  • Recognize major purposes and some distinguishing features of different types of texts.
  • Understand information conveyed by simple metaphors.

Top 10% PIRLS Benchmark (90th Percentile and above, Score 615 or above)

Reading for Literary Experience

Given short stories with one to two episodes of problem/resolution and essentially two central characters, students can:

  • Integrate ideas across a text to provide interpretations of a character’s traits, intentions, and feelings, and give text-based support.
  • Integrate ideas across the text to explain the broader significance or theme of the story

Reading to Acquire and Use Information

Given a variety of short informational materials including text, maps, illustrations, diagrams, and photographs organized topically or chronologically, students can integrate information from various texts and their own knowledge, and apply it to situations that might be encountered in the real world.

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