Young people who spend more time on their phones than with books have posted the weakest reading results recorded this century, a downturn that is pulling overall educational achievement lower, according to a major international assessment.
The findings come from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, whose 2025 round was made public Tuesday. Reuters reports that the exam evaluated 760,000 fifteen-year-olds spread across 91 countries, and the numbers for reading, math and science all landed at their lowest points since testing started in 2000.
Reading suffered a notable slide. The index peaked at 501 in 2012 before dropping to 466 in the most recent round, leaving the average teenager reading at a standard once considered normal for a child a full year younger. Governments and educators tend to treat PISA outcomes as the definitive measure of how school systems are performing worldwide.
According to the OECD, a familiar culprit sits behind the reading decline. “In reading, more screen time and less reading for pleasure have gone hand in hand with weaker results,” said the organization’s Secretary-General, Mathias Cormann. He pointed to a shift in how young people approach a passage, noting that “we’re also seeing more hasty reading, students rushing through a text and giving a quick wrong answer.”
Curiously, the retreat in reading proficiency hit teenagers from wealthier households harder than their less advantaged peers.
The other core subjects mirrored the same pattern. Science, which had reached 506 in 2009, fell to 486, while math slipped from 502 to 469 over that stretch, both bottoming out for the century as weaker reading dragged performance down.
On the question of devices in the classroom, the report declined to call for outright smartphone bans. Even so, it tied digital distraction to poorer science outcomes in 59 of the 82 systems examined, and more than a quarter of students said classmates were pulled off task by their devices during science lessons.
The data on screen time was substantial. In OECD member countries, teenagers said they averaged 3.4 hours of leisure device use on a typical weekday, plus roughly another 3 hours devoted to learning at school and at home. Cormann acknowledged that technology can serve education, though with a ceiling: beyond five hours of daily use, he said, scores begin sliding backward.
Regionally, East Asia stood apart from the rest of the field. The participating Chinese cities, along with Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, ran the strongest systems overall, and only Britain and Estonia managed to crack the top 10 in all three subjects from outside that region.
Artificial intelligence surfaced as its own concern. Close to half of all students said they turn to AI chatbots for schoolwork on a regular basis, yet those leaning on the tools to draft essays, condense readings and look up topics tended to trail by about 20 points in science, a gap the OECD equates to an entire year of learning.
