Hasty readers: why reading fell in PISA 2025 and how to teach deeper reading

What happened to reading

Reading is where PISA 2025 delivered its starkest news. The OECD average fell to 461 points, 14 points lower than in 2022 and 28 points lower than in 2015. The OECD equates the ten-year fall with about one and a half years of learning. Reading has declined since peaking around 2012.

The nature of the decline matters as much as its size. The OECD reports falls in the skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources and thinking critically about what we read. Across the OECD, girls scored 476 and boys 446, a 30-point gap.

Who are “hasty readers”?

PISA’s computer-based tests record how students interact with a task. The OECD describes hasty readers as students who rush through texts and give quick but incorrect answers. Their share almost doubled between 2018 and 2025. This is not a lack of effort on a single test day. It reflects a reading habit, skimming for a fast answer, that serves students badly when a question needs careful comparison or judgement.

The OECD also found that systems with larger declines in reading performance tended to show larger declines in student engagement. Rebuilding reading means rebuilding the willingness to stay with a text.

Strategies that slow reading down

1. Reciprocal teaching

Developed by Annemarie Palincsar and Ann Brown in the 1980s, reciprocal teaching has students take turns leading four moves on a shared text: predict, question, clarify and summarise. The teacher models each move first, then gradually hands it over. It turns comprehension from something that happens invisibly into a set of steps students can practise and discuss.

2. Multi-source text sets

PISA increasingly asks students to work across several sources. Give students two or three short texts on the same question, such as a news report, a data table and an opinion piece, and ask: Where do they agree? Where do they conflict? Which is most trustworthy for this claim, and why?

3. Lateral reading

Researchers at Stanford, led by Sam Wineburg, found that professional fact-checkers evaluate an unfamiliar source by leaving it and checking what other sources say about it, rather than studying the page itself. Teach students to open a new tab and ask: who is behind this, and what do others say about them?

4. Answer, then prove it

For any comprehension question, require a line reference or quotation as evidence. The small extra step interrupts the hasty habit and makes guessing visible.

5. Compare an AI summary with the original

Ask an AI tool to summarise a text students have read, then ask students to find what the summary left out, simplified or got wrong. This builds close reading and AI literacy in the same task, and shows why a summary is not a substitute for reading.

Building reading stamina

• Schedule regular, uninterrupted reading of longer texts, and increase length gradually.
• Read aloud and think aloud, showing how an expert reader slows down at a difficult passage.
• Offer choice within challenge, so students read texts they want to finish at a demanding level.
• Use short, frequent checks for understanding rather than one long test at the end of a unit.