Introduction

In today's information society, literacy ability is essential for maximizing success in the endeavours of daily life, continuing intellectual growth, and realizing personal potential. Similarly, a literate citizenry is vital to a nation's social growth and economic prosperity. To help countries make informed decisions about reading education, IEA's Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) provides internationally comparative data about students' reading achievement at 4th-grade of primary school. This age and grade is an important transition point in children's development as readers, because most of them have already learned to read, and do not read solely for the sake of practicing, but to gain more knowledge and to learn.

IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) is an independent international cooperative of national research institutions and governmental agencies with a permanent secretariat based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. For the past 50 years, IEA has been conducting large-scale comparative studies of educational achievement to gain a deeper understanding of the effects of policies and practices within and across systems of education internationally.

IEA and the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College, which is responsible for the coordination of PIRLS, set the framework and specifications of the study in cooperation with renowned researchers. PIRLS measures students' reading literacy every five years together with the background factors related to it. The first data collection was in 2001. Within each participating country the NRC (National Research Coordinator) and the National Centre under its control is responsible for conducting PIRLS. In Hungary, the National Centre is the Department of Assessment and Evaluation at the Educational Authority. With a different name and institution (formerly known as the Center for Evaluation Studies of KÁOKSZI and suliNova Kht.), however, it was the same group of experts who conducted both cycles of PIRLS.

This report provides a short overview of the PIRLS 2006 assessment results, and compares those with the relevant findings of the PIRLS 2001 study pointing out the positive or negative changes that occurred during the five years in Hungary. While providing a comprehensive review on the achievements of the 4th-grade students, it also shows their comprehensive abilities with regard to different reading purposes and different processes of comprehension required for the tasks, and it also analyses the gender differences in reading achievement. Finally, it describes some of the school and family related background factors measured by the PIRLS study, which are especially important with regards to the 4th-grade students' reading abilities.

The aim of this volume is to present those results and background factors that we deem the most important findings of the study. There will be a more thorough analysis of the study available in the "PIRLS 2006 National Report" to be published in the spring of 2008.