How to better promote high-achieving students has in recent years been part of the public and policy discourse on education in Germany. As a result, the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs has resolved on a support strategy for high-achieving students (KMK, 2015) aiming to better identify and foster high-achievers and students with such potentials. For German primary education the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016 reveals that 11 percent of fourth-graders reach the advanced international achievement benchmark. While this percentage does not significantly differ from the means of the participating EU and OECD countries, and has for Germany even slightly increased since 2001, there are quite a few European countries with substantially higher shares of top readers. Further, in the German PIRLS trend girls consistently outperform boys and the gender differences prove to be particularly pronounced in the ‘reading for literary purposes’ subscale (Hußmann et al., 2017).

This paper investigates for the four cycles of PIRLS gender differences in the group of high achievers and explores (1) whether these disparities can, at least partly, be explained by differences in the students' self-concept, motivation and behavior in reading as well as in their home literacy environment, and (2) which role these variables play regarding the chance of belonging to the group of advanced readers, both on the overall reading scale and the reading purposes subscales.

PIRLS’ concept of reading literacy refers to the purposes for reading and processes of comprehension and also to the students’ self-concept, motivation and behavior in reading (Mullis & Martin, 2015). The latter variables are of considerable relevance as they are substantially correlated with reading achievement and easier to pedagogically enhance than, e.g., basic cognitive abilities (Artelt et al., 2007; Schiefele, Schaffner, Möller & Wigfield, 2012). Extended expectancy-value models allow to systematically integrate assumptions on the relations between self-concept, motivation, behavior and achievement in reading (Möller & Schiefele, 2004) and also can take into account that such variables are influenced by the socio-cultural context (Simpkins, Fredricks & Eccles, 2015). In line with these models it can be assumed that structural family features (e.g., socio-economic status [SES]) and child characteristics such as gender, are related to familial process features (e.g., cultural activities) which in turn may influence the students’ individual traits (e.g., motivation) and their competence development (Watt, 2016). A close relation between structural family features and students’ reading achievement at the end of primary education in Germany has been repeatedly found (Hußmann, Stubbe & Kasper, 2017; Wendt & Schwippert, 2017). As regards familial process variables, relations between SES, home literacy environment and fourth-graders’ reading achievement are found to be comparatively close (Stubbe et al., 2007). Recent analyses further show for this age-group that the significant advantage of girls in reading can be explained through their higher self-concept, motivation and behavior in reading (McElvany, Kessels, Schwabe & Kasper, 2017). A longitudinal study with students from Grades 3-6 investigating self-concept, motivation, behavior and achievement in reading revealed existing or intensifying gender differences which for self-concept were moderated by SES in that for higher-SES children the gender gap grew less substantially (Becker & McElvany, 2018).

The analyses to be presented here further explore such relationships comparing boys and girls with high reading achievement, and investigate for the four PIRLS cycles the explanatory power of structural and sociodemographic variables on the one hand, and process as well as individual variables on the other, for the students’ reading achievement and their chance of belonging to the group of top readers, both on the overall reading scale and with regard to the subscales of reading purposes.

The analyses use student and parent data from PIRLS 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016 and include variables from the international instruments as well as the German national extensions (Hußmann, Wendt, Kasper, Bos & Goy, 2017). In the analyses the complex sample design and nested structure of the data are taken into account, using the IDB Analyzer (version 4) and SAS/STAT (version 9.4) as software. The total number of cases in the pooled dataset is n = 23419. Cases with missing data are deleted listwise (ibid.). Options of multiple imputation will be explored for the paper. Multigroup, multilevel logistic regression analyses by gender are conducted in which belonging to the group of students with high reading achievement (i.e., reaching the advanced international benchmark) is the dependent variable. As regards the independent variables, for reading self-concept and reading motivation trend indices across items from the four PIRLS cycles are scaled and the constructs are included as continuous variables in the models. The same is done for the home literacy environment, where a trend index is scaled from the parental responses to four aspects: number of books at home, number of children’s books at home, parents’ attitudes towards reading and parental reading activities with their child. The students reading behavior is included as a dichotomized variable (reading for fun outside of school – daily or almost daily vs. never or almost never). Migration background of the students (one vs. no parent born abroad; both vs. none parents born abroad) as well parental education (at least one vs. no parent with a degree of ISCED level 6 or higher) and occupational status (high vs. low professional status) are included as dichotomized variables. Additionally, the scores on a test of basic cognitive abilities of the students (KFT, N2; Heller & Perleth, 2000) are included as a control variable.

The analyses to be presented explore gender differences in high reading achievement at the end of primary education in Germany, describing trends in high achievement on the overall reading scale as well as in terms of different purposes of reading. Furthermore, the analyses will offer insights into gender-related similarities and differences in the roles that individual and familial variables play in predicting the chance of belonging to the top performers in reading. Thus the results should offer vantage points for in-depth studies to further explore factors revealed as promising for raising the number of students with high reading achievement in general, and for reducing gender differences by advancing reading competencies among boys.

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