Reading is one of the skills in which the performance of Spanish students has worsened the most, thus revealing a deeper problem: if a young person does not understand well what they read, they also lose the ability to solve a mathematical problem, interpret a scientific question, relate knowledge or develop complex thinking.

It is one of the messages left by the PISA 2025 report, published by the OECD, and which the Minister of Education, Milagros Tolón, has summarized in an idea picked up by the media at the national level: “Lack of reading comprehension is the basis of all problems.” And, in this situation, we are all part of the problem, but we are also part of the solution.

Screens, superficial reading, loss of sustained attention and, more recently, the use of artificial intelligence appear among the factors that help explain this deterioration. But around them a movement in the opposite direction is also beginning to occur. There are signs of certain exhaustion in the face of a digital life designed to demand attention permanently: the World Happiness Report 2026 states that 47% of young people between 18 and 27 years old wish that TikTok had not existed, while different countries are moving forward with restrictions on minors’ access to social networks. Australia already prohibits it for minors under 16 years of age and other governments are studying similar measures.

In any case, the results show a particularly marked deterioration in Spain, but also an international trend related to the transformation of attention and reading habits. Spain has obtained its worst results since it began participating in PISA in 2000 in the three main competencies that the study evaluates: reading, mathematics and science. The test was carried out in 2025 on some 30,000 15-year-old students from almost 1,000 Spanish centers, the majority enrolled in the 4th year of ESO.

And it is in reading where one of the most worrying data appears. Spain obtains 451 points, 23 less than in 2022 and 45 less than in 2015. The drop in the last decade far exceeds the average drop of 28 points registered among OECD countries.

The size of this difference is better understood taking into account the equivalence used in the analysis: approximately 20 points represent one school year. The accumulated decline in reading compared to 2015 would therefore be equivalent to more than two learning years.

Only 2% understand long and complex texts

According to PISA, 68% of Spanish students reach at least level 2 of reading competence. At this stage they can identify the main idea of ​​a text of moderate length, locate certain information and reflect on its purpose when expressly asked. At the high end, however, the ratio plummets. Only 2% reach level 5, which implies being able to understand extensive texts, confront abstract or counterintuitive concepts, and differentiate facts from opinions based on implicit clues.

The person responsible for coordinating the PISA study and senior analyst at the OECD, Tue Halgreen, has warned that students encounter difficulties with texts of more than 400 words and tend towards hurried reading. The concern lies precisely in the fact that reading is not an isolated skill. “If you don’t understand what you read, it is impossible for you to do a problem in mathematics, physics, chemistry or any question”Tolón has pointed out in the SER chain.

PISA also indicates a deterioration in reading comprehension that affects many educational systems. Spain presents an especially intense fall, but the problem transcends its borders. Among the explanations that are being analyzed is the transformation of reading habits caused by the digital environment.

Minister Tolón has related the results to the use of screens and with “hasty and superficial reading habits” associated with short messages that dominate a good part of the digital life of adolescents. From Asturias, whose score remains above the Spanish, European and OECD averages, its head of Education, Eva Ledo, has also pointed to “the transformation in attention and reading habits.”

Added to the loss of attention is another issue highlighted around the PISA results: perseverance in the face of difficult tasks. Learning also involves staying faced with a problem when the answer does not appear immediately, making mistakes, going back and trying another strategy. This tolerance for difficulty is especially important in mathematics and science, but also in reading a complex text. In an environment accustomed to offering immediate responses, stimuli and rewards, recovering the ability to sustain effort thus appears as another part of the educational challenge.

The report itself provides other relevant information. In OECD countries, students in schools where mobile phone use is prohibited are approximately 13% less likely to report suffering from digital distraction.
And Spain has moved rapidly in this direction. In 2025, 86% of students were enrolled in schools with some type of mobile phone ban, compared to the 67% recorded in PISA 2022 and well above the OECD average of 49%.

AI enters the PISA analysis for the first time

PISA 2025 also incorporates a variable that hardly existed in previous editions: the habitual use of generative artificial intelligence to study and do school work. Thus, 54% of Spanish students claim to use AI chatbots to learn at least once a week, compared to the 46% average in the OECD, according to the data released.

Its use is especially high to carry out preliminary research on a topic: 42% of Spanish students do it weekly, compared to 31% in the OECD. 40% use AI to summarize texts they should read, ten points above the international average, and 33% use it to write written works. Only 8% say they never or almost never use chatbots for any of the school tasks analyzed.

These data do not allow the deterioration of reading comprehension to be reduced to a single cause. The OECD itself proposes a more nuanced relationship. According to Halgreen, cited by The Vanguardthere is a negative correlation between certain uses of AI and academic performance, but the technology can be beneficial when used “with moderation and purpose.”
The question then becomes what intellectual work the student delegates. Using a tool to support an investigation does not offer the same learning as asking it to summarize precisely the text that one should read, understand and elaborate.

Framing the debate solely in terms of more or less technology would, however, simplify it. The question is also what is done with it and for what educational purpose: it can serve to personalize learning, meet different needs or expand the tools of teachers and students, but it can hardly replace processes such as deep reading, concentration, critical thinking or human interaction. The challenge is, therefore, both in preserving these capabilities and in teaching how to use the new tools without delegating them.

An ecosystem of brief stimuli, multitasking and immediate responses

The results have also opened the debate on the structural causes of the decline, which are difficult to attribute to a single factor. From Andalusia, the impact of the pandemic on the educational process has been pointed out, while the Ministry rejects attributing the decline to the LOMLOE and recalls that the fall is also observed internationally. But the scope of the data invites us to look beyond an educational law, an autonomous community or a specific generation. Teens are growing up within an ecosystem built around short stimuli, infinite scrolling, notifications, short videos, multitasking and immediate responses.

Thus, PISA puts educational figures to a social transformation that affects how we consume information, how long we stay in front of the same idea and how much space we leave for concentration and sustained thought. And this transformation also forces us to think about what skills students will need in the coming years. PISA 2029 will precisely focus on how students learn and relate in a world crossed by digital technologies and artificial intelligence. Reinforcing reading, mathematics and science is essential, but the educational horizon already incorporates another requirement: learning to relate critically with technologies that will be part of their academic, professional and daily life.

Along these lines, the networks themselves can also be part of the solution. Faced with a digital culture marked by infinite scrolling, trends that happen at enormous speed and content whose value runs out in a matter of days, phenomena like “BookTok” have managed to make reading an element of conversation, belonging and identity for a part of young people. In 2025, 6.3 million books linked to recommendations from this community were sold in Spain, worth more than 116 million euros, according to data from NielsenIQ BookData and Media Control. Rather than posing a simple opposition between screens and books, perhaps part of the challenge consists precisely in ensuring that reading once again competes for attention: that the book also circulates, is recommended, generates conversation and, ultimately, becomes fashionable again.

Because if understanding a long text begins to be exceptional, the problem does not end with the grade obtained in reading. It affects the ability to learn mathematics or science, but also other essential skills for functioning in a society saturated with information: interpreting an argument, detecting a contradiction, distinguishing a fact from an opinion, persevering in the face of a problem that does not offer an immediate answer or sustaining sufficient attention to develop one’s own judgment.
Therefore, reading comprehension can hardly be understood solely as a responsibility of educational centers. Digital habits are also built at home, on platforms, in the media and in society itself because understanding long texts, after all, has to do with the formation of criteria.