A measure for literacy – 05/31/2023 – Education

The MEC (Ministry of Education) presented this Wednesday (31) a definition of what it considers a literate student. This is good news, as the educational systems and the MEC itself can, with this, establish goals to be pursued up to the second year of elementary school. This definition was based on a survey of 251 literacy teachers from the five Brazilian regions, in addition to specialists.

Based on the information available so far, since the ministry did not release a more detailed technical note on how it arrived at the evaluation measure, nor did it deepen it, it would be necessary to advance in some points.

The first is that of not understanding mathematical literacy as part of literacy. There is already a difficulty in the training of teachers who work in the early years in the area in the country. The absence of a measure for mathematical literacy can reduce the incentive to design continuing education programs, in addition to reinforcing the imbalance between the components in the areas of language and mathematics in initial teacher education courses. It is critical that both components are considered.

The second refers to the need to qualify the measure. According to the document presented by the MEC, a literate student will be considered one who reaches 743 points or more on the scale in the Saeb (Basic Education Assessment System).

According to the MEC, students who reach this score “read small texts formed for short periods and locate information on the textual surface. They also write, with spelling deviations, texts that circulate in everyday life for the purposes of simple communication: inviting, remember something, for example. Students are beginner readers/writers, who interact in a more autonomous way, mainly with texts that circulate in everyday life and in the literary artistic field, in reading and writing practices that are characteristic of school literacy”.

Here there are questions of two orders. The first is to better qualify the skills required to be considered a literate student. What are “small texts formed by short periods”? A letter, a note, a text with a defined number of pages? Are we trying to read and understand the texts? What defines a “novice reader/writer”?

The third contemplates the measurement itself. In general, when international assessments are carried out such as PISA (International Student Assessment Program), and more recently the International Study of Progress in Reading (PIRLS – Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), Brazil occupies the lower ranks among countries who perform the tests.

Something that often escapes analysis is that our measure of literacy may not be the same as those countries. Reading a text and understanding it are different skills. If we assess our students only on their reading fluency, for example, we have a measure of how many words they read correctly in a given time. But this exam is not capable of attesting that the student in question understood the text. Incidentally, our national assessment system does not assess reading comprehension. If the country understands that international measures are relevant to our educational system, the ideal is to align them with them.

Finally, MEC made a great move to hear from teachers what they consider literate students today. But this does not prevent it from adopting bolder measures in the future. When we look at what a student of the same age must learn in the United States, we see that the requirements are higher in reading and writing. An American student in the second year is expected to be able to retell stories, compare different versions of stories written by different authors or from different cultures, read and understand literary texts of fiction and poetry, among other skills.

Evidently, goals that discourage schools should not be established, but it would be important for our country to be able to establish a more flexible parameter for literacy, which is periodically revised and which allows for the celebration of advances and the continuous search for better results. The country of Magda Soares and Telma Weisz is fully capable of meeting this challenge.