PIRLS 2011 Assessment Framework - Proj AVI

communities outside of school as students talk with their familiesand friends about ideas and information acquired from reading.Overview of Aspects of Student’s Reading LiteracyPIRLS focuses on three aspects of student’s reading literacy:• purposes for reading• processes of comprehension• reading behaviors and attitudes.Reading Purposes and ProcessesPurposes for reading and processes of comprehension arethe foundation for the PIRLS written assessment of readingcomprehension. The PIRLS assessment focuses on the twooverarching purposes for reading that account for most of thereading done by young students both in and out of school:• reading for literary experience• reading to acquire and use information.Four types of comprehension processes are assessed in PIRLS:• focus on and retrieve explicitly stated information• make straightforward inferences• interpret and integrate ideas and information• examine and evaluate content, language, and textualelements.The four processes are assessed within each purpose for reading.Figure 1 shows the reading purposes and processes assessed by PIRLSand the percentages of the test devoted to each for PIRLS and prePIRLS.Both the PIRLS and prePIRLS assessments devote half of the test toeach of the purposes for reading. However, because prePIRLS isoverview of IEA’s PIRLS Assessment | 13