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Assessment
The assessment instruments included fourth grade-level stories and informational texts collected from several different countries. Students were asked to engage in a full repertoire of reading skills and strategies, including retrieving and focusing on specific ideas, making simple and more complex inferences, and examining and evaluating text features. The passages were followed by open-ended and multiple-choice format questions about the text.
Reading passages were printed in some students' assessment booklets, while other students were given the "PIRLS Reader," a short anthology of a variety of reading texts, in addition to the assessment booklet. Using different booklets allows PIRLS to report results from more assessment items than can fit in one booklet, without making the assessment longer. To provide good coverage of each skill domain, the test items developed asked for about five hours and twenty minutes of testing time. However, testing time was kept to one hour and twenty minutes for each student by clustering items in blocks and randomly rotating the blocks of items throughout the nine student test booklets. As a consequence, no student received all items but each item was answered by a representative sample of students.
Questionnaires
Background questionnaires were administered to collect information about students' home and school experiences in learning to read. A student questionnaire addressed students' attitudes towards reading and their reading habits. In addition, questionnaires were given to students' teachers and school principals to gather information about students' school experiences in developing reading literacy. In countries other than the United States, a parent questionnaire was also administered.
In all, PIRLS took 1½ to 2 hours of each student's time, including the assessment and Background Questionnaire.
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