Reading scores plummet as ‘digital distraction’ harms students

School students’ reading scores have plunged across the developed world, as widespread access to AI and social media has harmed teenagers’ ability to concentrate, said a newly published international survey.

The performance of the average 15-year-old across the OECD in 2025 was more than a year behind where it was in 2018, according to the latest edition of the influential PISA survey of comparative educational performance, released on Tuesday.

The report shows that key skills — such as drafting or critically evaluating texts — have fallen at the expense of skim reading and limited understanding, suggesting that more schools should restrict smartphone use to help pupils concentrate on education.

The connection between passive technology consumption and lower scores was “compelling”, even though the study did not provide direct evidence of cause and effect, said Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD.

Reliance on AI, the survey found, tended to produce worse scores in science for both pupils and education systems, with 37 per cent of students prioritising “common sense” over scientific reasoning — an ominous sign for evidence-based fact-checking.

That will serve them ill in the AI age, when “reflection and complexity” will be all the more important, said Schleicher. With those skills “declining rapidly”, young people now “read faster” than in 2018, but “less accurately”, he explained.

Since 2000, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) has been a closely watched benchmark for educational performance. It surveys students’ performance in science, maths and reading, usually every three years, alongside questions on wellbeing and financial literacy.

The new report shows that reading scores across the OECD have fallen by 25 points and maths by 22 points since 2018. “Given that 20 score points is roughly equivalent to a year of learning, this implies that a majority of 15-year-old students across the OECD in 2025, on average, were performing at a level typically expected of 14-year-olds,” according to Pisa.

Schleicher linked the decline in the latest scores to the dominance of distracting short-form videos on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, as the report suggested that “digital distraction” is harming education across the world.

“We cannot say for sure, but skimming social media feeds and rapidly processing information may be contributing to worsening ability and motivation to engage with complex texts and data,” the report said.

In science, the study found that pupils who used AI “almost every day” were significantly less able to summarise or draft texts that they had read than those who “almost never” used it — although the effect was less harmful for those who used it “to help me learn”.

“You don’t get fit by watching sport,” Schleicher said. “If AI makes things easy, it’s not great for you in the long run. It gives you better results, but it doesn’t enhance learning. You have to make an effort. If learning is easy, it’s not learning.”

However, he said that AI would have a critical role in improving the quality of education through tailored products that allowed pupils to learn through “Socratic questioning” rather than through chatbots doing their homework.

He praised systems such as Korea, which had been “much more thoughtful and intentional in their use of technology”, with teachers involved in designing products that enhanced learning, rather than a student free-for-all.

Data visualisation by Allysa Honra