The SEA-PLM 2024 Regional Snapshot on Writing
The SEA-PLM 2024 Regional Snapshot on Writing presents key findings from the writing domain. It focuses on students’ ability to express ideas effectively in written form, an essential yet often underexamined component of foundational learning. While the writing domain was an optional domain in the 2024 assessment cycle, all six SEA-PLM participating country chose to implement it. The writing domain expands the scope of SEA-PLM beyond reading, mathematics, and contextual data to provide a more comprehensive picture of students’ literacy development. Writing is not only a core literacy skill but also a critical tool for communication, learning across subjects, and participation in society.
This Regional Snapshot accompanies the public release of the 2024 student writing datasets and complements the reading, mathematics, and contextual results released in December 2025. The writing data have been processed and released separately due to methodological and psychometric differences in scoring and scaling compared to the 2019 cycle. As a result, the 2024 writing datasets, indicators, and results are not directly comparable with those from 2019. Further details on these comparability limitations are provided in the accompanying technical note. Nevertheless, both the 2019 and 2024 results remain robust, valid, and reliable for analysing student writing performance within countries and for cross-country comparisons within each respective cycle.
The findings aim to support countries in strengthening foundational writing, reducing inequities in learning opportunities, and improving the teaching and assessment of writing within more inclusive and resilient education systems. The full SEA-PLM 2024 Regional Report is under development, for release in Q2 2026.
