Among the many findings in this week's PISA 2025 release, one specific, granular data point deserves particular attention from writing and reading teachers: the share of what researchers term "hasty readers," students who move through a text quickly and answer questions incorrectly as a result, has very nearly doubled between 2018 and 2025. This isn't simply a restatement of the broader reading score decline; it's a specific behavioral pattern, describing not just what students know but how they're actually approaching the act of reading itself.

A rising share of hasty readers points toward a specific instructional target rather than a vague, unaddressable decline: students increasingly approaching text with a skimming, extraction-oriented mindset, pulling out what seems like the needed answer quickly rather than genuinely engaging with meaning, structure, and nuance. This pattern has an obvious and direct connection to close reading instruction specifically, the deliberate, slower practice of annotating, questioning, and interpreting a text rather than scanning it for a quick answer.

For writing teachers, this finding matters beyond reading class, since the same hasty, extraction-oriented approach to a source text tends to show up directly in student writing: superficial engagement with evidence, quotes pulled without real analysis of context or nuance, and source use that reads as checking a box rather than genuine intellectual engagement with what a source actually argues.

Why this specific pattern is worth targeting directly

Unlike a broad reading score decline, which can feel too large and diffuse to act on directly, a specific behavioral pattern like hasty reading offers something genuinely actionable: explicit instruction in slowing down, re-reading, and annotating can directly counter exactly this pattern, in a way that's harder to design instruction around for a more general comprehension decline. Close reading pedagogy, requiring students to read a passage multiple times, annotate for specific purposes, and articulate interpretation rather than just extraction, is a direct, well-established pedagogical response to precisely the pattern this week's data describes.

• Build in explicit close reading practice that requires multiple passes through a text, not just a single read for information extraction
• Teach annotation as a deliberate, purposeful practice, not just underlining, connecting directly to the hasty-reading pattern this data identifies
• Model the difference between extracting a quick answer and genuinely interpreting a passage, since many students haven't seen this distinction made explicit
• Connect close reading practice directly to writing instruction, since hasty source engagement in reading tends to produce shallow evidence use in writing
• Build in low-stakes, frequent close reading practice rather than reserving it only for major assignments, to build the habit consistently

Where this connects to source use in student writing directly

Teachers grading research-based or evidence-based writing have likely already noticed a version of this pattern in student work: a quote dropped into a paragraph without real engagement with what the source actually argues, or evidence that technically supports a claim without demonstrating genuine understanding of the source's fuller context. This week's PISA finding offers a useful, current, credible frame for naming this pattern explicitly with students and colleagues, connecting a familiar classroom frustration to a documented, measurable, and now clearly named international trend.

Grading rubrics that explicitly reward genuine source engagement and interpretation over surface-level extraction, distinguishing the two clearly rather than treating any evidence use as equally strong, give students a concrete incentive to slow down and engage more deeply, directly countering the hasty-reading pattern this data describes.

A specific, actionable takeaway from a large, complex report

Amid a large, complex international report covering many dimensions of student performance, this specific finding about hasty reading offers writing and reading teachers something genuinely concrete to act on this year: not a vague mandate to "improve reading scores," but a specific, well-defined behavioral pattern that close reading instruction is directly designed to address.