Predicting Secondary Students’ Reading Literacy Across Cultures Using Machine Learning: A Case Study

Reading literacy is a critical literacy for lifelong learning in many domains. This study predicts secondary students’ reading literacy using two supervised machine learning algorithms, lasso regression (LR) and random forest (RF), based on the Japan and Ireland data from PISA 2022. Findings indicated that: (1) RF outperformed LR; (2) both models performed better on the Ireland data than on the Japan data; (3) joy of reading played an important role in predicting reading literacy.