Reading literacy. You’ve read the text, but did you get its meaning?

Results of NIKO-2023 and trial NIKO-2025 results showed: students can find information in a text but struggle to interpret, assess and apply the received knowledge. Tasks requiring arguments and analysis of various sources proved to be the most difficult.

Three useful advices to teachers:

1.     Work with different types of texts. Continuous, non-continuous (schematics, graphs), composite, creolized - each type allows you to retrieve information. Reading literacy is shaped not only by literature, but also by mathematics, biology, and history.

2.     Teach how to ask questions. “What is this text about?” is not the correct question. The ones to be asked are: “Why was that told?” “What is the motive?” “How can we check the information?”.

Critical thinking begins with doubt.

3.     Make situations to apply the information. Let the text be a tool that can help select an algorithm during math classes, understand an instruction on chemistry and assess the news’s veracity during history classes.

Reading for the sake of one’s life is the main target to be reached by joint work during all academic classes.