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Reading Literacy

Pictogram symbolising reading literacy. A person reading a book.

In 2025, reading literacy in 15-year-old students was assessed as an additional domain of the PISA survey. In 2018, 2009 and 2000, it was a focal domain of the study.

Definition

In the PISA study, reading literacy is defined as the ability to understand, use, evaluate and reflect on texts. It also involves engaging with texts in order to achieve one's own goals. Reading literacy forms the basis for developing one's own knowledge and potential and for participating in society.
 

Tasks

In order to fulfill the comprehensive definition of reading literacy, the PISA test uses different types of texts. The tasks vary in difficulty. For instance, reading tasks may contain continuous texts such as newspaper articles or letters. However, non-continuous texts such as graphics and tables are also included. The information to be used to solve a task may refer to a single source or to several different sources. Since 2008, PISA has also included reading tasks in which pupils gauge the quality of information contained in text as well as the credibility of statements. Digital reading is also assessed means of tasks for navigating websites.

The texts in the study are categorized according to four dimensions:

Sources

  • Texts with a single source (e.g. novels, brochures and leaflets)

  • Texts with multiple sources (e.g. daily newspapers or websites with articles by different authors and/or with different publication dates).

Organization und navigation

  • Static (e.g. in a newspaper article)

  • Dynamic (e.g. on a website).

Text form

  • Continuous texts (e.g. essays, novels and letters)

  • Non-continuous texts (e.g. tables, graphics and timetables)

  • Mixed text forms (e.g. websites and online forums with continuous and non-continuous parts).

Text type

  • Description

  • Narration

  • Exposition

  • Argumentation

  • Instruction

  • Transaction.

Situational context

All texts are embedded in one of four possible situational contexts:

Sub-skills of reading literacy

The following sub-skills play a key role in reading literacy:

In addition, there are cognitive processes related to task management. An example of this is setting and monitoring a reading goal.

Difficulty of tasks

The difficulty of the tasks depends on the skills required to solve them, and on the specific characteristics of the text. For example, locating a specific piece of information from a single-source text tends to be fairly easy. A task will become more challenging as different pieces of information have to be assembled in order to solve it.

Sample reading literacy test questions may be found here.