ASTANA — The latest PISA 2025 results reveal a tension likely to grow more important in the years ahead: how can a country prepare young people for an economy shaped by AI without allowing technology to displace the foundational skills that make knowledge useful in the first place?
For Kazakhstan, the question is particularly relevant. The country has made significant progress in digital readiness, but those advances have not yet translated into the level of reading, mathematics, science and problem-solving performance that Kazakhstan needs.
The country scored 385 points in reading in PISA 2025, compared with an OECD average of 461. Its mathematics score was 414, against 463 for the OECD, while science stood at 420 versus 482. In the new computational problem-solving assessment, Kazakhstan scored 449 compared with an OECD average of 500.
Mathematics declined by 12 points from the 2022 assessment, while reading remained broadly unchanged. The results are based on 22,680 students from 643 schools, representing around 324,600 15-year-olds nationwide. The mathematics results are difficult to overlook.
Kazakhstan remains far behind the strongest-performing education systems, with B-S-J-Z (China) at 612 points, Singapore at 563, Macao at 549, Chinese Taipei at 546 and Japan at 525. At the same time, Kazakhstan is part of a broader international trend: mathematics performance has declined across many education systems.
Across the OECD, the average mathematics score fell by nine points between 2022 and 2025, while the decline over the longer 2015–2025 period was 22 points Reading, however, raises a different and perhaps deeper question because it concerns the very capacity students need in order to make sense of all those other sources of information.
Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills and head of the PISA program. Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills and head of the PISA program, describes the latest findings on AI and education as “somewhat sobering,” noting that the students who perform best academically tend, as a rule, to use AI less often.
“Reading has always been the foundation of all other skills, so this is particularly important. What worries me most is the decline in those reading skills that are becoming increasingly important in the age of AI: the ability to compare information from different sources, distinguish facts from opinions and navigate ambiguous information,” he said.
That distinction matters. Reading is not simply the ability to understand the words on a page. It is the ability to follow an argument, recognize its assumptions, weigh evidence and decide whether one interpretation is more convincing than another. Those are precisely the kinds of tasks that become more, not less, important when people are surrounded by an enormous volume of machine-generated information.
Schleicher says the problem is not only that reading habits are changing, but that the quality of engagement with information may be changing as well. “Young people have started to read faster, but at the same time less accurately. Of course, this cannot be called a healthy trend.