PCAP-13 2007: Report on Reading Strategies and Reading Achievement is the third in a series of research projects in which the PCAP-13 2007 data set is used to examine questions of interest to educational policy-makers and practitioners in Canada. It focuses on the factors that contribute to student performance in reading.

Some significant findings include the following:

  • The strategies that Canadian students use in their reading and the attitudes students have toward reading and toward school are consistently related to reading competency.

  • There is a set of consistent relationships of reading strategies to reading achievement for 13-year-old Canadian students that are consistent across gender, across English- and French-speaking students, and across provinces and territories.

  • The relationships of reading strategies to reading achievement do not vary widely across Canada's educational systems.

  • Teaching strategies that are more cognitively complex have a positive relationship to reading achievement, whereas simpler strategies are negatively related.

  • Teaching and learning reading strategies are complex processes that interact with one another, suggesting that in-depth, context-specific survey design and analyses are necessary to fully understand each teaching and learning strategy's role in enhancing student performance.

  • The value of PCAP derives primarily from both the sample coverage and the evidence generated by the questionnaires, resulting in the capacity to examine in a comprehensive way the relationships of various antecedent and process variables to student performance on the reading-achievement measures.