Associations between Social Learning Environments and Students’ Reading Comprehension Skills: An Analysis of PISA’s Saudi Arabia Dataset

Despite the widespread use of social educational tools during the last decade in K12 education, the growth curve of utilizing these tools to enhance reading activities has remained lower than expected in learning environments. However, the rapid shift from face-to-face education to online education brought about by the pandemic has attracted educators who utilize these technologies to enhance reading scores among students. Drawing on data from Programme for International Student Assessment 2018, prediction models were conducted to investigate the effects of social reading activity tools on reading proficiency scores while controlling for other factors. The results indicate that reading emails, involvement in online chat (e.g., WhatsApp), reading online news, searching for information online to learn about particular topics and searching for practical information online (e.g., schedules) are significant predictors of higher reading proficiency scores. On the other hand, taking part in online group discussions or forums is a negatively significant predictor of reading proficiency scores. Moreover, reading proficiency scores differ depending on the types of schools students attended, their gender and their social, cultural and economic status when interaction was introduced in the model. These results should help educators as well as researchers to strategically utilize social reading activities according to the nature of the tasks they assign to students.