Skip Navigation

PIRLS and ePIRLS Results


Exhibit 2. Description of PIRLS international reading benchmarks: 2016

Benchmark
(score cut-point)
Description of benchmark skills
Advanced
(625)
Icon of an open book. Students can interpret story events and character actions to describe reasons, motivations, feelings, and character development with full text-based support in relatively complex literary texts. They can begin to evaluate the effect on the reader of the author's language and style choices.
Icon of an open book. Students can distinguish and interpret complex information from different parts of text and provide full text-based support when reading relatively complex informational texts. They can integrate information across a complex informational text and explain relationships and sequence activities. They can begin to evaluate visual and textual elements to consider the author's point of view.
High
(550)
Icon of an open book. Students can locate and distinguish significant actions and details embedded across relatively complex literary texts. They can make inferences to explain relationships between intentions, actions, events, and feelings, and give text-based support. They can interpret and integrate story events and character actions, traits, and feelings as they develop across the text. They can recognize the use of some language features (e.g. metaphor, tone, imagery).
Icon of an open book. Students can locate and distinguish relevant information within relatively complex tables or informational texts. They can make inferences about logical connections to provide explanations and reasons. They can integrate textual and visual information to interpret the relationship between ideas and evaluate and make generalizations about context and textual elements.
Intermediate
(475)
Icon of an open book. Students can independently locate, recognize, and reproduce explicitly stated actions, events, and feelings when reading a mix of simpler and relatively complex literary texts. They can make straightforward inferences about the attitudes, feelings, and motivations of main characters. They can begin to recognize language choices and interpret obvious reasons and causes, recognize evidence, and give examples.
Icon of an open book. Students can locate and reproduce two or three pieces of information from a mix of simpler and relatively complex informational texts. They can make straightforward inferences to provide factual explanations and begin to interpret and integrate information to order events.
Low
(400)
Icon of an open book. Students can locate and retrieve explicitly stated information, actions, or ideas when reading relatively simple literary texts. They can make straightforward inferences about events, and begin to interpret story events and central ideas.
Icon of an open book. Students can locate and reproduce explicitly stated information from relatively simple informational texts and other formats and begin to make straightforward inferences about explanations, actions, and descriptions.
NOTE: Score cut-points for the international benchmarks are determined through scale anchoring. Scale anchoring involves selecting benchmarks (scale points) on the achievement scales in terms of student performance and then identifying items that students scoring at the anchor points answer correctly. The score cut-points are set at equal intervals along the achievement scales. The score cut-points were selected to be as close as possible to the standard percentile cut-points (i.e., 90th, 75th, 50th, and 25th percentiles). More information on how the score cut-points were set can be found in the PIRLS technical documentation at https://timssandpirls.bc.edu/publications/pirls/2016-methods.html.