Pirls (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) is an international survey conducted every five years by Iea (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) on students in the fourth year of elementary school to measure literacy, that is, the ability to understand and use forms of written language: these are important skills at this stage of schooling, in which we move from learning to read to "reading to learn", and which therefore condition subsequent developments. The results for Italy are certainly comforting: Italian pupils are in the highest positions in the international ranking, with a value of 537 points, which is 10 points higher than the international average of the 50 countries participating in the survey. The figure is all the more interesting considering that Italian students have one of the lowest average ages among survey participants, almost a year younger than the three European countries (Finland, Sweden and Poland) that have higher scores than theirs. However, there are important territorial gaps in achievement in Italy, with a difference between the Northwest and the South of 36 points, equivalent to 8 months of schooling.
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