PIRLS assesses the reading literacy of fourth-grade pupils on a five-year cycle that began in 2001; the 2021 round began the move to digital assessment, and a 2026 round is in progress. Its context questionnaires follow the TIMSS model. Principals report on school resources, the place of reading in the school, climate, discipline and their own background; teachers describe reading instruction and their professional development; and parents complete the Learning to Read Survey on early literacy at home. National centres supply information on the reading curriculum.
Türkiye took part in the first cycle in 2001 and returned in 2021 after a gap of twenty years. Because PIRLS samples whole classes, teacher responses can be linked directly to their pupils, but, as in TIMSS, they describe the teachers of a representative sample of pupils rather than a representative sample of teachers. Analysts should use the five plausible values, the student weights and jackknife replication, for example through the IEA IDB Analyzer. From 2021 onwards the data are also distributed in R format.