Back
Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The national report from the International Survey of Educational Achievement PISA-2025 delivered grim results: Ukrainian adolescents are reading less and less. Actually, it’s not so much about reading as about a broader failure.
Briefly — about how our children not only read less, but understand what they read less.
Read it, but didn't understand
Studies conducted among hundreds of 15-year-old Ukrainians showed that almost half of them — 43% — do not reach the basic level of reading literacy. In other words, they can more or less read a text, but being able to say what it’s about, evaluate and make sense of what they read, draw conclusions and compare multiple sources is something “not everyone” can do. A year ago that share was 45,44%, and in 2018 it was 26%. So earlier almost three quarters of adolescents coped with relatively simple text tasks, and now — a little over half.
One might think, so what — a child reads poorly… Soon everything will be voice-based and accessible anyway. In reality, the lack of thoughtful reading skills looks roughly like what former Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine Hanna Novosad described in her social media post: “In everyday life this can look like: reading an announcement about a contest but not understanding whether you can participate if there are age limits and other conditions stated in different parts of the text. Understanding individual sentences of a news item, but not being able to explain in your own words what exactly happened. Reading two short messages about the same event, but not noticing how they contradict each other...”.
It seems kids do read something on their phones, but it’s not the same — the mental process in that case requires minimal effort.
Math is better than reading
It took us less than ten years to “slide” on reading. The average reading score of Ukrainian adolescents in PISA-2018 was 465,95 points. In 2022 it fell to 426,71. In 2025 it dropped further, to 418,42. Overall, over the period since 2018 — minus 47,53 points.
To grasp the scale: in PISA a difference of roughly 20 points is approximately equated with one year of schooling. Researchers caution this is only a guideline, not an exact formula. But even this benchmark helps imagine the magnitude of the failure: 15-year-olds read and think at the level of 12-13-year-olds.
Reading turned out to be the weakest of the three main domains assessed. In mathematics Ukraine scored 430,99 points, in science-related subjects — 448 points. In reading — only 418,42. And by the way, if you look at results by gender, girls read better than boys (62% versus 47%).
Meanwhile, between 2022 and 2025 the girls’ result changed relatively little: from 438 to 434 points. But boys experienced a new decline — from 415 to 402 points.
There is also a noticeable gap between city and countryside: in 2025 the basic level of reading was reached by 59% of urban adolescents and only 41% of rural ones. So in villages almost six out of ten 15-year-olds are unable to comprehend a text more complex than a social media caption. By comparison, in 2018 the situation was better in both places: the basic level was achieved by 69% of urban and 53% of rural adolescents.
But comparing 2018 and 2025 in Ukraine is difficult: PISA-2018 covered the whole country, while after 2022 the survey was conducted in only 17 of 27 regions. Also, for example, Kharkiv and Dnipro were not included, where educational opportunities are usually higher. Therefore with wider coverage the final figures might have been somewhat different.
Singapore is the best
Between surveys Ukraine experienced a pandemic, prolonged remote learning, full-scale war, destruction of educational infrastructure, displacement of children within the country and abroad, and major changes in learning conditions. So you can sweeten the pill with the fact that Ukraine is not yet the worst. But should we model ourselves on the weak — is that the right response? And should we reassure ourselves that declining reading results are a global problem?
More than 760 thousand 15-year-old students from 91 countries took part in PISA-2025. For the first time Armenia, Ecuador, Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia, the Kurdistan region of Iraq and Dushanbe were included.
The leader in reading in PISA-2025 was Singapore — 535 points. For comparison: the average result across countries was 466 points, while Ukraine scored 418 points. So the Ukrainian score turned out to be about 48 points below the average (but not in the last decile).
Also among the world leaders were Japan, Korea, Estonia, Chinese Taipei, Macau and certain Chinese regions. Most of these education systems ranked in the top ten across all three domains: reading, mathematics and science. The United Kingdom also appeared among the ten most successful systems across all three domains.
A particularly telling comparison is with our closest European neighbors. Poland scored 495 points in reading, the Czech Republic – 490, Lithuania – 464, Germany – 465, Finland – 469.
The study notes that “Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Montenegro, Qatar and Slovakia were able to both reduce the share of low-performing students and increase the share of top performers. This is an important signal: worsening results are not an inevitable consequence of the digital age.” Ukraine belongs to the second group.
The EU’s target for 2030 is that the share of 15-year-olds with low results in reading, mathematics and science should be below 15%. For now in Ukraine it is 45,44%, and the question of how well our children actually understand the world around them remains open.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Прочитав, але не зрозумів: PISA-2025 - про проблеми з читанням у половини українських школярів". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: KP.UA.
