Abstract

As the largest country in Central Asia, Kazakhstan offers a strategically important site for analysing how global curriculum agendas are recontextualised in national policy. It shows how international reform ideas are translated in a post-Soviet context. Finland was selected as the comparative case because it is a Nordic country with a well-established curriculum tradition, a contrasting governance architecture, and strong performance in international large-scale assessment. The aim of this study is to compare how lower-secondary curriculum and assessment-regulation documents in Kazakhstan and Finland formulate educational expectations, link them to assessment criteria, structure thematic emphases, and align with global educational discourses. The lower-secondary level was selected because it provides a comparable stage of compulsory education in which foundational expectations and assessment rules are formally articulated before upper-secondary differentiation reduces cross-national equivalence.

National curricula regulate educational expectations and assessment through the statement genres they employ and the tightness of linkage between expectations and criteria. This study uses an NLP-based comparative document analysis design operationalized through computational text analysis (text-as-data). Using cross-lingual semantic similarity methods based on multilingual embeddings, it quantifies alignment between curriculum expectations and assessment criteria across countries. The analysis encodes atomic statements from official documents (Kazakhstan: 25 expectations, 56 criteria; Finland: 210 objectives, 62 criteria) and estimates coupling through directional best-match similarity, threshold coverage, one-to-one matching, and size-matched bootstrapping.

Both systems exhibit strong internal coherence, but with different architectures. Kazakhstan shows near-isomorphic alignment between outcomes and criteria (0.9479), indicating that assessment criteria closely mirror intended learning outcomes. Finland reflects an anchored-breadth pattern, with strong links from objectives to criteria (0.8351) and even stronger links from criteria to objectives (0.9401), suggesting that criteria are tightly anchored in objectives while the objective layer remains broader. Cross-system convergence is higher for expectations and objectives than for criteria, indicating that evaluative phrasing is more system-specific than curricular intentions. Alignment across thematic dimensions and global discourses is also patterned: Finland is stronger on literacy, civic and social learning, sustainability, and inclusion, whereas Kazakhstan is comparatively stronger on digital competence in practice; STEM salience is broadly similar across both systems.

The study contributes a replicable statement-level framework for measuring curriculum-assessment coupling across national systems, shows that apparent convergence in curricular aspirations may conceal divergence in regulatory design, and suggests that cross-national comparability is more feasible at the level of curricular intentions than at the level of evaluative rules.