Factors influencing students’ reading literacy in Morocco: A multilevel analysis

Morocco is a multilingual country with a diverse culture. When it participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) for the first time, its reading literacy scores ranked relatively low in the test. Employing hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), the present study examined the effects of both student- and school-level factors on students’ reading literacy in Morocco. Student-level (N = 5800) and school-level (N = 179) data were drawn from the PISA 2018. The results showed that students’ reading literacy differed significantly across schools, accounting for about 40.5% of the overall variation. Further, the results showed that at the student level, when the variables of gender and family indices (i.e., economic, social, and cultural status) were controlled, language spoken at home, understanding and remembering of meta-cognition, self-concept of reading, expected occupational status, adaptation to instruction, teacher support in test language lessons, and duration in early childhood education and care all had significant effects on students’ reading literacy. At the school level, school location, school type, school size, shortage of educational material, and proportion of highly educated teachers had a crucial influence on student reading literacy, either directly or indirectly. To date, the reasons for these effects have not been systematically investigated. Morocco was the only African country to take part in the PISA test and it would be worthwhile to explore the factors affecting reading literacy in this low-performing country. Further, the results may be applicable to some extent to low reading performance in other countries.