Hundreds of teachers have already undergone courses on reading literacy via projects run by the National Office for Certified Measurements of Education (NÚCEM), as reading literacy still poses a problem to many Slovak students. Slovak students performed in 2013 PISA tests below the OECD average. According to Ivana Sorbyová of the National Office, Slovak students are disadvantaged with respect to their OECD counterparts due to the fact that they were not used to this sort of testing at schools.
"Currently, the issue is being intensively dealt with by Slovak language and literature teachers, but we feel the need to have also teachers of other classes participate in the process by giving reading literacy tasks to students”, she stressed. The absence of focus on reading literacy leads to students being unable to use the knowledge imparted from texts, to interpret it, to form a general understanding, and extract information required for his or her life, family, work, etc.
