Teen Reading Scores Hit Worst Level This Century as OECD’s PISA Study Links Decline to Screen Time
Teenagers around the world are reading at the lowest level recorded this century, and a major new international assessment points squarely at screen time as one of the primary drivers behind the decline. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development tested 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries for its 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment, widely known as PISA, and found reading, mathematics, and science scores all sitting at their lowest levels since the data collection began in 2000.
The scale of the reading decline is stark when placed against the assessment’s own history. PISA’s reading index peaked at 501 in 2012, a high point that reflected years of steady improvement across participating education systems. That figure has now fallen to 466, a drop significant enough that the average 15-year-old today is reading at a level PISA previously associated with students a full year younger. Since PISA results are closely watched by governments, education ministries, and policy researchers worldwide as one of the most reliable comparative gauges of student performance, a decline of this magnitude carries weight well beyond a single testing cycle.
Reading was not the only subject affected, though it appears to be acting as something of an anchor for broader academic decline. Science scores fell from a 2009 peak of 506 down to 486, while mathematics dropped from 502 to 469 over the same period. OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann connected the subjects directly, telling reporters that in reading, more screen time and less reading for pleasure had gone hand in hand with weaker results. He also noted a shift in how students engage with text, describing a pattern of hasty reading in which students rush through a passage and give a quick, incorrect answer rather than working through the material carefully.
One of the more counterintuitive findings in the report is that the reading decline hit harder among students from better-off backgrounds. Typically, socioeconomic advantage correlates with stronger academic outcomes across most measures PISA tracks, which makes this particular pattern worth paying attention to. It suggests that access to more devices, more consistent internet connectivity, and potentially more unsupervised screen time at home may be working against these students in ways that offset whatever academic advantages come with greater household resources.
The report is careful not to reduce the issue to smartphones in classrooms alone. According to the assessment, students in OECD member countries reported spending an average of 3.4 hours per weekday on digital devices for leisure, on top of another 3 hours per weekday using devices in the classroom and at home specifically for learning purposes. That combination adds up to more than six hours of daily screen exposure for the average teenager, spanning both recreational and educational use. Cormann noted that digital devices genuinely can support learning, but only up to a certain threshold. Once daily device use crosses roughly five hours, results begin to decline rather than improve, suggesting a point of diminishing and eventually negative returns rather than a straightforward case of technology being universally harmful or helpful.
Classroom distraction emerged as a related but distinct concern. The report found that digital distraction is linked to lower science scores across 59 of the 82 education systems studied, and more than one in four students reported that devices distract their classmates specifically during science lessons. Despite that finding, the OECD stopped short of recommending blanket smartphone bans in schools, a notably cautious stance given how directly the data seems to point toward device use as a contributing factor. That restraint likely reflects the complexity of implementing and enforcing such bans consistently across dramatically different education systems and cultural contexts, rather than any doubt about the underlying correlation between screen time and weaker academic performance.
Artificial intelligence tools added another layer to the findings, and the results here may be the most immediately actionable for schools and parents. The study found that nearly half of all students now use AI chatbots regularly to support their learning. However, students who used these tools specifically for drafting essays, summarizing texts, or researching topics scored roughly 20 points lower in science, a gap the OECD equated to a full year’s worth of learning. That distinction matters. It suggests the problem isn’t AI tool use in general, but rather a specific pattern of using AI to bypass cognitive effort rather than to supplement it, effectively outsourcing the thinking that the learning process is meant to build in the first place.
Not every region followed the same downward trajectory, which offers some useful contrast for understanding what might be working elsewhere. East Asia emerged as the strongest-performing region in this round of testing, with Chinese cities that participated in the assessment, along with Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, posting the best overall educational outcomes. Britain and Estonia were the only countries outside East Asia to crack the global top 10 across reading, mathematics, and science simultaneously, an achievement that stood out given how broadly scores declined elsewhere. What separates these systems from the global trend, whether it’s stricter device policies, different cultural attitudes toward reading, or structural differences in how reading instruction is delivered, is likely to become a significant focus for education researchers and policymakers trying to understand why some systems have proven more resilient to the pressures reshaping teenage attention spans worldwide.
Taken together, the 2025 PISA results paint a picture of a generation whose relationship with reading has been fundamentally reshaped by the devices that now occupy the majority of their waking hours. The data doesn’t suggest technology itself is the enemy of learning, given that moderate device use for educational purposes showed no clear negative effect and even correlated with stronger outcomes up to a point. What it does suggest is that the balance between screen time, reading for pleasure, and genuine cognitive engagement has shifted in a direction that is measurably hurting how well teenagers around the world can read, think through problems, and retain what they learn, a trend that shows no clear sign of reversing on its own.
