The feasibility of using an international common reading progression to measure reading across languages: a case study of the Vietnamese language

In the last few decades, student achievement in many countries has been assessed and reported against a developmental learning continuum which underpins the knowledge and skills being measured. There have been efforts to place students from different countries on the same scale. However, those efforts have often been limited to individual projects and countries. There has been no common framework and no common metric for assessments to be compared across countries and levels. Recently, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) has worked with the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) to develop UIS reporting scales for reading and mathematics with the aim of enabling countries to examine and report using a common framework and common quality control. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of the feasibility of adapting and applying the UIS reporting framework to the reading of Vietnamese language.