From the iPhone 6 to the infinite scroll of TikTok: two reading courses lost in 10 years

BarcelonaIn 2015, the iPhone 6s hit the market, the first one to have the live photo option –taking a short video of the moment so you can choose the frame that interests you–. Instagram had its definitive boom, reaching 400 million monthly users, still without stories or reels. There were five years left until TikTok revolutionized social media with short videos. Among Spanish adolescents, books like The Hunger Games saga, After, or The Fault in Our Stars were triumphs. In the PISA tests, Spain scored 496 points in reading comprehension, placing itself ahead of the European average (487) and the OECD average (493).

Only a decade later, the picture has changed completely. In the 2025 PISA tests –from which Catalonia was excluded for excluding more students than permitted–, Spain has 451 points in reading, placing itself below Europe (459) and the OECD as a whole (461). The educational report shows an alarming reality: in a decade, Spanish students have regressed more than two school years in reading comprehension. In other words, students finishing 4th year of ESO today have the reading level of 2nd year ESO students from 2015. In 2025, Spanish minors spent, on average, two hours a day on TikTok. The equivalent of an entire month each year. In total, they used their mobile phones for more than four hours a day.

However, is the whole decline the fault of mobile phones? The experts consulted by ARA agree that it is a more than relevant factor, but that in the case of the students who have just taken the tests, it is also necessary to take into account the learning stage during which the pandemic caught them –at 10 years old– and also structural aspects such as how and when they start being taught to read or what happens at these students' homes.

The text that fits on a screen

One of the ideas that has been repeated most in this edition of the PISA report is that students are not capable of extracting the main idea from texts of more than 400 words, that is, what fits on a mobile phone screen. However, Icrea researcher from the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) Pilar Prieto warns that the problem is not the length of the text but the type of reading habit that is being trained with the mobile phone: "The mobile phone exposes us to short and fragmented texts, notifications, links, and constant changes of attention, and gets us used to scanning and jumping quickly from one piece of information to another. Understanding a long text requires just the opposite: maintaining attention, remembering what we have read, relating ideas, and constructing a global meaning from them".

In the same vein, doctor of linguistics and secondary school teacher Anna Llauradó insists: "With the mechanism of the infinite scroll on the mobile phone, there is a very diagonal reading, which, furthermore, at any moment makes you leave the text via a link. Of course, reading comprehension requires quite the opposite – explains the expert from Equitat.org as well –. It requires a calm, continuous reading, integrating each sentence into the previous one, relating each idea with the knowledge you have of the world. This, on the mobile phone, is not the case". "So, if they read little, and of the little they do read a good part is on the mobile phone, we are greatly reducing the time dedicated to comprehensive reading. In the end, it is all a bit of a perfect storm", she laments.

Stopped in the moment of reading to learn

Beyond mobile phones, the effect of school closures may also explain part of Spain's drop of almost more than 20 points between the last PISA report and the one we learned about this week. The students examined were in 5th grade during the pandemic. "At this cycle, we are in the midst of a transition from what we traditionally called moving from learning to read to reading to learn. If this part has not been done systematically enough, we are talking about a fundamental pillar of reading not being well established," warns Llauradó. She explains that it is one thing to be able to decode a text to read it aloud, and another to read aloud and understand nothing.

Prieto also explains that the stage from 8 to 11 years old is the moment to automate "reading decoding" in order to dedicate more resources to understanding the content, relating information, making inferences, and identifying the main ideas. "At this moment, comprehension depends increasingly on the mastery of oral language, vocabulary, prior knowledge, and the ability to integrate information from the text," she details.

However, the ICREA researcher from UPF also warns that not everything can be attributed to the fact that these students were 10 years old during the pandemic: "The decrease in reading practice, changes in learning habits, and the effects of the pandemic on motivation and emotional well-being may have also influenced it. We are probably talking about a cumulative effect of different factors at a stage that is especially important for consolidating reading comprehension.".

Less vocabulary

Leaving the pandemic aside, pedagogue and co-director of the postgraduate degree in neuroeducation at the University of Barcelona Anna Forés also brings a new factor to the table: we are learning and using less and less vocabulary. "We use fewer and fewer words. We find an example in the fact that stories no longer enter homes, and this is very serious". Forés insists that "vocabulary is becoming impoverished" in a generalized way. "If I have very little vocabulary, I cannot understand the world or use strategies to understand it –insists the pedagogue–. And here an important point is that we talk less and less at home. We have dropped to four hours of conversation a week at home, this is very little. We have lost the pleasure of talking for the sake of talking and of listening, and this is a problem", describes Forés.

Prieto also speaks about the importance of orality. "Telling a story requires organizing events, establishing cause-and-effect relationships, understanding the intentions of the characters, making inferences, and maintaining a coherent narrative thread. These are processes very similar to those we later need to understand a written text", she explains. Furthermore, she also offers a point of hope: "Oral narrative skills at the beginning of schooling are related to reading comprehension many years later, and these skills can be taught and improved".