Youth Reading Scores Are Going Down

The Programme for International Student Evaluation, or PISA, has become a big deal for school systems around the world.

Run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, PISA started in 2000 and is administered every three years. It tests 15-year-old students in over 90 countries on their proficiency in science, math and reading.

Recent PISA scores have shown a notable decrease in reading proficiency.

“Between 2018 and 2025, reading performance fell in three-quarters of education systems with comparable data, across the OECD by 25 score points — more than a year of learning,” wrote OECD education and skills director Andreas Schleicher in the introduction to PISA 2025, released Sept. 8.

“The biggest surprise is who fell furthest behind. It was not the most disadvantaged students, but those from wealthy families. This finding points to a much broader challenge than inequality alone.”

A shift to digital reading may have academic impacts

Canada did relatively well this time compared to most of the global competition.

But our scores are still lower than they were three years ago — and three years before that.

Since 2000, Canada’s reading has fallen from 534 to 490, according to PISA 2025. Its science score has dropped from 534 to 510. And math is down from 532 to 485. A drop of 25 points, Schleicher notes, is equal to the loss of a school year. Still, Canada’s scores this year are above the OECD average.

Schleicher identifies several likely causes for the decline in reading scores. “We cannot say for sure,” he writes, “but declining levels of reading for enjoyment and the shift towards digital reading — skimming social media feeds and rapidly processing information — may be compromising the ability of students to engage with complex texts and data.”

He goes on to say: “This raises questions about whether devices such as smartphones — designed to maximize a user’s attention — are compatible with sustained academic attention.”

The answers to those questions are a resounding no, almost every time.

A different experience online

In the 1990s, I taught in a computer-based college program for what we still called “multimedia.” I was exhilarated by the speed with which computers could both access and create educational material, and the ability of the networks (including the web) to disseminate such materials around our computer lab and around the world.

It was obvious from the start that my students, colleagues and I were both reading and writing differently when we were online. The screen was simply a different medium from the printed page. I paid attention to what was going on with my students (and with me), and researched what others were doing.

In the end, I wrote a book, unimaginatively titled Writing for the Web. It is now out of print and the publisher has gone out of business, like so many others. The irony is not lost on me.

Looking for jolts

As I tried to explain in the book, on paper we pay most attention to the beginnings and ends of paragraphs and the beginnings and ends of sentences. In a long sentence or a long paragraph, we tend to skip from beginning to end, paying relatively little attention to what’s in the middle. In print we may have to read a long and detailed argument before we understand it (Aha!) or we don’t (Huh?).

But text onscreen delivers something the page rarely does. In my book I called it a “jolt,” a stimulus caused by the delivery of information, whether in images, sounds or text (Huh! Wow! Oof!). Even the “bong” of an Apple laptop starting up is a jolt.

Once we’re on an onscreen page, we scan it quickly, skipping long stretches of text and looking for landmarks like headings, subheadings, and graphics — more jolts.

We still focus on the beginnings and endings of paragraphs, but we prefer short ones delivering an immediate jolt in the first line. A screen full of solid text repels us, unless the headline at the top says: This is all about you.

We learn to anticipate the jolts, and then to seek them out wherever we can. That’s why AI memes, and podcasters saying outrageous or scary things, or people on social media insulting one another grab our attention — very briefly. We aren’t just looking for information. We want an emotional punch from it.

Over 70 years ago, Canadian researchers James Olds and Peter Milner discovered that delivering an electric pulse through an electrode into a rat’s brain was a powerful form of reinforcement, making them repeat whatever they were doing when they got the pulse.

If rats could press a switch to get the reinforcement, some would do so up to 2,000 times an hour.

Addictive doomscrolling

Onscreen jolts reinforce what we’re doing when we’re onscreen, especially using social media. We learn to seek out short messages that promise to deliver a jolt right away; then we seek another jolt. Some people call it “doomscrolling.” Others call it “clickbait.”

Of course, the presidential jolt meister Donald Trump can publish relatively long social media posts because he’s taught us to expect jolt after eye-rolling jolt in every line. Those who follow him on Truth Social are quick to share his jolts with their own followers, and soon millions are clicking away like lab rats, pressing the switch for their own thrills.

We are all too aware of the screen’s addictive qualities, and addiction makes us impatient with tedious print on paper and long, complex text demanding close attention.

I see it in myself. I read a lot of books, both onscreen and on paper. But unless it is remarkably incendiary, text on paper starts to bore me. I tend to take breaks for onscreen jolts before returning to paper and the long plod down another page.

Conditioned to short attention spans

I can see why PISA scores have been falling. Almost from the beginning of school, students are already hooked on their phones and tablets. They’re rapidly conditioned to have short attention spans, so complex ideas become opaque to them.

In 2010, two years after I’d retired and three years after Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone, I took a substitute-teaching gig for a semester at another college. The instructor left strict instructions that students were not to use their phones in class. But when I tried to enforce that rule, a revolt broke out. Some students were personally offended that they had to put their phones away.

I stuck to the rule, allowing them to use their phones during class breaks. But I could tell that I’d lost them.

Smartphone use has increased exponentially since then, and students are now using AI routinely in the classroom.

“If machines increasingly master the routine,” PISA’s education and skills director Schleicher writes, “then education must double down on the irreducibly human. On our ability to think about our own thinking. To zoom out and see the system behind the symptom. To build and navigate complex social relationships. To make ethical judgments when the data runs out. To create what has never existed before. Those are not soft skills; they are survival skills in the digital age.”

Those survival skills are best developed by reading print on paper. Just as it’s a survival skill to make a fire without matches, it’s a survival skill to understand a complex chain of argument and recognize its logic — or its illogic.

Training to use digital media

These skills need time and experience simply to prepare to learn them. Just as small children have no business on e-scooters, they have no business using digital devices for anything but games and movies — movies where people solve problems by thinking and talking, not by using smartphones.

Kids should grow up using print on paper, and should take digital-device training just as they take driver training, when they are considered old enough.

Schools and families should encourage as much face-to-face socializing as possible, as well as public speaking, debate and team activities that reward attentive listening and clear speech. As writers they should be capable of essays and encouraged to write poems and stories.

Sure, students will eventually acquire and use smartphones and AI, after they have learned to think for themselves and to recognize lies whether on paper or onscreen. At that point, digital devices will be useful tools for them, not addictive stimulus boxes.

And then our students will have a real chance to become irreducibly human.