From Reading Culture to Reading Competence: What PISA 2025 Tells Kazakhstan

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Kazakhstan has set itself an ambitious goal: to become a reading nation. In May, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed a decree placing the development of reading culture among the country’s national priorities. The policy includes new libraries, a national digital library platform and a Reading Nation concept for 2027–2031. These are welcome developments. The latest international evidence also suggests that Kazakhstan needs to think carefully about what it means to be a strong reader.

The latest OECD PISA results for Kazakhstan provide an uncomfortable starting point. In PISA 2025, Kazakhstan’s average reading score was 385, compared with an OECD average of 461. Only 36% of Kazakh 15-year-olds reached at least Level 2 in reading, compared with 69% across the OECD. Almost no students in Kazakhstan reached the highest reading levels.

The more revealing number may be 36%. At Level 2, students should be able to identify the main idea of a moderately long text, locate information using several criteria and reflect on the purpose of a text when directed to do so. Higher levels demand increasingly complex skills, including comparing sources, recognising implicit meaning, separating fact from opinion and judging the reliability of information. PISA therefore gives us a picture of how confidently young people can use reading to make sense of unfamiliar information.

Kazakhstan’s reading difficulties are also longstanding. According to the OECD, reading performance has remained relatively stable since the country first participated in PISA in 2009. Kazakhstan scored 390 that year. Sixteen years later, it scored 385. The pattern stretches across several generations of students and predates the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent arrival of generative artificial intelligence.

Research conducted inside Kazakhstan offers some clues about what may be happening. Akhmetova, Imambayeva and Csapó examined more than 1,500 Grade 6 and Grade 8 students and found something that complicates the common claim that young people simply lack interest in reading. Around 85% of the Grade 6 students and 79% of the Grade 8 students reported that they enjoyed reading. Yet the relationship between positive attitudes towards reading and actual reading achievement was relatively weak.

Encouraging young people to pick up books clearly has value. Frequency alone tells us little about how readers respond when a text becomes difficult, unfamiliar or open to several interpretations. Students also need strategies for deciding what deserves attention, how different pieces of information fit together and when a claim should be questioned.

Their related work on reading strategies also identified weaknesses in how students approach texts, including deciding which sections deserve closer attention and using information from tables and figures to support understanding. Modern reading increasingly requires young people to move between an article, a graph, a website and several competing claims before deciding what information can be trusted.

Evidence from teachers presents a more encouraging picture. In 2025, Sarmurzin and colleagues surveyed 117 Kazakh literature teachers and interviewed experienced practitioners, finding a growing emphasis on reading comprehension, critical thinking, technology and more student-centred approaches. Teachers also identified continuing problems with curriculum coherence and the relationship between some reading materials and students’ everyday experiences.

Teacher preparation appears less settled. Research published in 2026 involving 254 final-year preservice teachers from five Kazakh universities found that 72% were uncertain about the distinction between functional literacy and traditional reading comprehension. The researchers also identified limited preparation in informational texts and critical digital reading, particularly among students preparing to teach Kazakh language and literature.

Greater professional support would help teachers respond to an increasingly complex reading environment. University programmes and professional development can give teachers more opportunities to work with inference, source comparison, evidence evaluation and critical digital literacy. Released PISA tasks can also show the kinds of reading processes students find difficult and provide useful material for lesson design and discussion.

There is an important limit to how far this should go. PISA measures particular forms of reading, and education should avoid turning those measures into a complete definition of what good reading looks like. Teaching students primarily to succeed on PISA-style tasks could narrow the curriculum and encourage another form of test preparation without necessarily creating more thoughtful or engaged readers. Reading also involves imagination, curiosity, emotional engagement, interpretation, enjoyment and the experience of spending time with ideas that do not lead towards a correct answer on an assessment.

PISA is most useful as a diagnostic tool. Its results can reveal weaknesses in areas such as inference, comprehension and source evaluation, while reading education itself should remain considerably broader. The aim should be to develop young people who can approach many kinds of texts with confidence, from novels and poetry to news reports, scientific arguments and digital information.

Kazakhstan could also make reading a clearer responsibility across the school curriculum. A history student comparing conflicting accounts of an event is practising reading. A science student deciding whether evidence supports a conclusion is doing the same, as is a geography student combining information from a map, graph and written report. Across these subjects, questions such as “How do I know this?”, “What evidence supports the claim?”, “What has been left out?” and “Which source should I trust?” can help students treat reading as a way of thinking rather than simply retrieving information.

Schools also need to protect space for sustained reading. Young people now encounter enormous quantities of written material through social media, messaging platforms, websites and increasingly AI systems. Much of this information arrives in short fragments. Regular opportunities to stay with longer and more demanding texts, discuss them, annotate them and return to difficult passages should remain part of school life. Sustained attention is itself becoming an important educational skill.

Generative AI adds another layer to this reading environment. AI can summarise a chapter, explain an argument and produce an answer within seconds. Students need strong skills for deciding whether that summary is accurate, what it has left out and whether the evidence supports the answer. One useful classroom activity might involve comparing an original article with an AI-generated summary. Students could identify missing qualifications, check claims against the original source and discuss how the meaning has changed. Used in this way, AI can support deeper reading.

Kazakhstan’s 2026 decree on developing reading culture already provides a framework for moving in this direction, particularly through its emphasis on reading in the era of artificial intelligence. Continued investment in books, libraries and positive reading cultures remains valuable. The next stage should connect that access more directly with how young people understand, question and use what they read.

A reading nation needs citizens who can stay with difficult ideas, recognise weak evidence, compare competing accounts and reach informed conclusions. It also needs readers who find pleasure in language, become absorbed in stories, encounter unfamiliar perspectives and sometimes read without being asked to extract a measurable skill from the experience. These abilities and experiences develop gradually through years of purposeful reading across classrooms, subjects and languages.

The PISA score of 385 should be treated as more than a position in an international ranking. It offers a useful warning about the depth of reading skills many young people currently possess and gives policymakers and educators a clearer sense of where attention is needed. Kazakhstan has already committed itself to becoming a reading nation. The next stage is to create the conditions in which young people can read widely, read carefully, enjoy what they read and learn to think for themselves through the process.

The author is Michael Jones, an writing and communications instructor, School of Social Science and Humanities, Nazarbayev University (Astana). 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Astana Times. 

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