A teenage student reading on a laptop
Bookiverse initiative

PISA Reading Practice

PISA Reading Practice is a Bookiverse initiative that gives older students a way to rehearse the kind of reading-literacy comprehension measured by the OECD's PISA assessment before they sit a real administration. Each practice assessment presents an original set of texts — never a reproduction of a copyrighted PISA passage — followed by multiple-choice and short written-response items that span the three reading processes PISA reports on: locate information, understand, and evaluate & reflect. The items also span PISA's two text-source purposes, single text and multiple text, including a simulated multi-tab website research task modeled on PISA's digital reading component. After submitting, a student receives a scale score mapped to PISA's international proficiency levels, together with a breakdown by text purpose and reading process, so the practice experience mirrors the structure of PISA reporting as closely as a self-scored, browser-based exercise reasonably can.

The practice assessments and games are in English. They can be used by all schools and teachers that teach English as a first language or use it as a medium of instruction, and that take part in PISA in English. For fourth-grade students, Bookiverse also offers ePIRLS Reading Practice.

Practice assessments

Ten practice assessments are available below. Each one is a full four-block reading test — two single-text passages (one narrative, one informational) and two multiple-text tasks, one in print and one as a simulated-internet research task — with its own original passage set and item bank, arranged in three difficulty tiers.

01Practice Assessment 1Four reading blocks · digital research task included 02Practice Assessment 2Four reading blocks · digital research task included 03Practice Assessment 3Four reading blocks · digital research task included 04Practice Assessment 4Four reading blocks · digital research task included 05Practice Assessment 5Four reading blocks · digital research task included 06Practice Assessment 6Four reading blocks · digital research task included 07Practice Assessment 7Four reading blocks · digital research task included 08Practice Assessment 8Four reading blocks · digital research task included 09Practice Assessment 9Four reading blocks · digital research task included 10Practice Assessment 10Four reading blocks · digital research task included

Assessments are added to this page as they are published; a link above will lead to that assessment once its file is in place in this same folder.

Reading-level journey games

Two games complement the practice assessments. Where an assessment is a fixed four-block test with a score at the end, a game takes a student through the eight PISA reading proficiency levels one at a time, from Level 1c to Level 6, as stops on a journey through a 3D world. The games are meant to show what each level asks of a reader and to give practice at that level, with feedback after every question.

The Silk Road Caravan A camel caravan sets out from the Eastern Gate and crosses a dune sea, an oasis, a mountain pass and a bazaar city to reach an observatory. The texts cover desert travel, underground water tunnels, roadside inns, the name ‘Silk Road’, the price of traded goods and how paper-making reached Samarkand. 8 stops · 64 questions · Levels 1c to 6 Play The Silk Road Caravan → The Overland Express A train leaves a harbour station and runs through farmland, forest and a lakeside, over a canyon viaduct and a snow summit, to a high plateau. The texts cover why trains run on rails, steam-engine water stops, railway time, track gauge, timetable margins and the story of the first film audience and the train. 8 stations · 64 questions · Levels 1c to 6 Play The Overland Express →

What each game includes

  • Eight stops, one for each reading level (1c, 1b, 1a, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6), with Level 2 marked as the minimum proficiency level. Stops unlock in order, and a stop is cleared when at least half of its questions are answered correctly.
  • At every stop, a short summary of what readers at that level can do, paraphrased from the OECD's level descriptions.
  • Eight multiple-choice questions per stop, 64 per game, on original texts. The texts grow with the level: single sentences at Level 1c, notices and price lists at 1b, short stories and articles from 1a to 3, and essays and sets of sources that disagree at Levels 4 to 6.
  • A label on every question naming the reading process it calls for: locate information, understand, or evaluate & reflect.
  • Feedback after each answer, with a short explanation that points back to the text.
  • A score that moves within the level's own band (for example, 407 to 480 at Level 2), using the same cut-point scores as the practice assessments, a bronze, silver or gold result for each stop, and a record of the whole journey at the end. Progress is saved in the browser.

What the games are for

  • Making the proficiency levels concrete. A student, teacher or parent can see the kind of text and task that each level description refers to.
  • Offering a graded route into PISA-style reading. A student starts with the literal meaning of single sentences and works up to judging how far a source can be trusted.
  • Giving low-stakes practice in the three reading processes. There is no timer, every answer is explained, and a stop can be repeated.
  • Providing a shorter activity than a full assessment. A stop has eight questions, so it can be used within a lesson or at home, and students who find a four-block assessment too long can begin here.

The games are practice material, not a measurement. Their questions have not been trialled with students, so the level attached to each stop follows the OECD's level descriptions rather than measured difficulty, and the score shown marks progress through the game, not a student's PISA level. The two games share no texts or questions.

About the PISA assessment

PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) is administered internationally by the OECD every three years to 15-year-old students. Reading literacy is reported on a scale with a historical baseline mean of 500; the OECD average reading score in the most recent cycle, PISA 2025 (results published September 2026), was 461, reflecting a widely reported decline since earlier cycles. Reading proficiency runs from Level 1c (the lowest) through Level 6 (the highest), with Level 1 split into three sub-levels (1c, 1b, 1a) and Level 2 defined as the Minimum Proficiency Level — the baseline PISA considers necessary to participate fully in society. These practice assessments use the exact reading cut-point scores OECD published for PISA 2025: 1b at 262.04, 1a at 334.75, 2 at 407.47, 3 at 480.18, 4 at 552.89, 5 at 625.61, and 6 at 698.32. PISA's reading-literacy framework assesses three processes — locating information, understanding, and evaluating & reflecting — across both single texts and multiple texts, including a digital reading component that simulates searching and reasoning across websites. The link below goes to the OECD's own PISA resources, not to Bookiverse content.

Two things about the real PISA 2025 reading assessment are worth knowing and can't be reproduced in a self-scored practice page: it is delivered as a multistage adaptive computer-based test (early responses route a student to a harder or easier set of items), scored by item-response-theory ability estimation rather than simple percent-correct, and it added a short, separately timed reading-fluency check. These practice assessments are fixed-form — every student answers the same items in the same order — and are meant to build familiarity with PISA's reading processes and text types, not to reproduce its adaptive delivery or scoring model.

About this practice material. The passages, tasks, and items in Bookiverse's PISA Reading Practice assessments are original compositions written for this initiative — they are not official OECD/PISA materials, and no copyrighted PISA passage is reproduced on this site. Scoring uses a simplified linear mapping from percent correct to a 200–800 scale, intended to illustrate how PISA reporting works; it is not the item-response-theory scaling the OECD uses to produce actual PISA scores. Treat practice results as an illustration of PISA-style reporting, not as a validated reading-level diagnosis. The same holds for the two journey games: their texts and questions are original, and the scores they show mark progress within each level's band, not a measured reading level.