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PISA 2025 Reading Results: Scores Hit Record Lows — What Parents Can Do at Home

By Sebastián Herrera · September 17, 2026 · 8 min read

The PISA 2025 reading results came out on September 8, and every headline said roughly the same thing: teen reading is at the lowest level ever recorded. If your child is four, six or eight, you probably read those stories with a knot in your stomach. So let's start with the most important clarification: PISA tests 15-year-olds. No four-year-old takes PISA, and nothing in that report is a forecast about your kid.

That said, the data does matter, and there is an honest bridge between that news and your living room. Below you'll find what the numbers actually say — and what they don't — why it's a mistake to turn the overlap between screens and reading into a proven cause, and six small, concrete things you can do with a child ages 3 to 8. No guilt, no doom: the point isn't to leave you scared, it's to leave you with something that's actually up to you.

What the PISA 2025 reading results actually say

PISA is the assessment the OECD runs every three years. It measures reading, math and science, always in the same group: 15-year-old students. This round included more than 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries and economies. The headline numbers, unvarnished:

• The OECD average in reading landed at 461 points.
• Reading fell about 14 points between 2022 and 2025.
• Between 2015 and 2025 the drop was 28 points across the OECD average — described as roughly a year and a half of learning. In non-OECD countries the decline was 16 points.
• It is the lowest level PISA has ever recorded across its three core domains.
• Girls outscore boys in reading by 30 points on average.
• The top performer was Singapore at 535 points, followed by B-S-J-Z (China) at 527.

What "Level 2" means, and why you keep hearing about it

Level 2 is the threshold the OECD treats as the minimum needed to participate fully in society: read an ordinary text, grasp the main idea, draw a simple conclusion. About 31% of OECD students don't reach Level 2 in reading — which also means 69% do.

One more figure that often gets clipped in coverage: one in five 15-year-olds across the OECD is now a low performer in science, math and reading at once, up from 16% in 2022. That is not "one in five can't read."

How the U.S. did

American 15-year-olds scored 490 points in reading, above the OECD average of 461 — but 14 points lower than in 2022, described as the equivalent of about seven months of learning. 26% are low performers and only 13% are high performers, and the reading gap between the strongest and weakest students has widened by 50 points since 2015. The U.S. story isn't a collapse; it's a slide, plus a spread.

Why it's happening: what we know and what we don't

This is where most coverage rushes. It's worth slowing down, because the difference between "coincided" and "caused" changes what we're supposed to do about it.

The decline started before the pandemic

Reading has been sliding since its peak around 2012 — nearly a decade before anyone had heard the word "lockdown." The pandemic joined a curve that was already heading down; it didn't start it.

Screens and reading: an observed overlap, not a proven cause

The report notes that greater digitalization, more screen time and declining reading for pleasure have coincided with weaker literacy outcomes. That word is the whole ballgame, and it's worth spelling out: the report describes a coincidence, it does not demonstrate a cause. Happening at the same time is not the same as making something happen.

Maybe screens crowd out reading. Maybe kids who already read little spend more time on a phone. Maybe something else is pushing both. PISA doesn't settle that question, and a headline that says "screens wrecked reading" isn't quoting the report — it's interpreting it. What we do know is that reading time now competes with a lot more than it did fifteen years ago, and that part you can protect at home.

The "hurried readers"

Maybe the most interesting finding: the share of students who answer fast but wrong nearly doubled in seven years, from almost 7% in 2018 to 11% in 2025. That's not really a decoding problem; it's a staying problem — holding attention on a text that doesn't pay off immediately. That capacity gets built long before age 15, partly by sitting next to someone and listening to a long story.

One more piece of context: more than one in four students say their classmates are distracted by digital devices in most or all science lessons.

What does this have to do with my 3- to 8-year-old?

Let's say it again, because this is the part that gets distorted: PISA tests 15-year-olds. A four-year-old is not "on track" toward any PISA score. That straight line doesn't exist, and anyone who draws it for you is selling something. What's true is more modest and more useful: the reading comprehension measured at 15 rests on three things built much earlier — vocabulary, sustained attention and enjoying reading.

PIRLS: the other assessment, the fourth-grade one

PIRLS measures reading comprehension in fourth grade — children around 9 and 10. And it's been sliding too: of the 32 countries with comparable data in 2016 and 2021, 21 declined, 8 held roughly steady and only 3 improved. The report attributes this to "some widespread negative impact of the pandemic on fourth-grade reading." That's the honest bridge: it isn't that PISA is about your child, it's that the trend also shows up in children far younger than 15.

Why these years are the ones with the most room

The American Academy of Pediatrics says shared reading "helps build the foundation for healthy social-emotional, cognitive, language and literacy development," and recommends encouraging it from birth and at least through kindergarten.

Harvard's Center on the Developing Child adds the other piece: the back-and-forth interactions between an adult and a child — what they call serve and return — shape brain architecture and are associated with language development, emotional regulation and frustration tolerance. A story read out loud is exactly that: your child asks, points, interrupts, and you return.

So ages 3 to 8 aren't the moment to worry. They're the moment with the most room. Our guide to bedtime stories about feelings covers how to use those same minutes to talk about what your child is going through.

Six concrete things you can do at home

None of these six is a program. They're small habits that fit inside an ordinary night.

1. Read every day, even if it's ten minutes

Ten minutes a night builds something an hour on Sunday doesn't: expectation. It helps to pin it to the same slot every time; our guide to a bedtime routine for kids ages 3–8 explains how to fit the story into an order your child can anticipate.

Try saying: "After teeth, story. Always."

2. Let them pick the book — and reread the same one

Choosing is half of learning to like reading. And if they ask for the same book fourteen nights running, you're not wasting time: repetition is how young children consolidate vocabulary and story structure, and it gives them the predictability that settles them before sleep. Keep the book the same and change only the question at the end.

Try saying: "Which one tonight? You pick."

3. Talk about the story — don't quiz them on it

"What was the dog's name?" is a test. "Why do you think he did that?" is a conversation, and it's exactly the muscle PISA measures at 15: infer, connect, explain why. One open question a night is plenty. Then go quiet and count to five before rescuing them.

Try saying: "What would you have done instead?"

4. Read aloud above their own reading level

This is the one that slips right when a child starts reading independently at six or seven. Their listening level runs well ahead of their decoding level, so when you read them something harder than they could manage alone, they hear words and sentence shapes they can't yet read. That's where vocabulary grows.

Try saying: "I'll read this one — it has funny big words and I like them."

5. Keep screens out of story time

The report doesn't prove screens caused the decline, but two things can't occupy the same stretch of evening. If the story starts where the screen ends, the story loses every time. Put a buffer between them — tidy the toys, brush teeth, dim the lights. The adult's phone counts too.

Try saying: "Tablet off, and once we're in pajamas it's story time."

6. Let them see you read

Kids copy what they see, not what they're told. If no adult in the house ever reads, reading is a school thing. If they see you with a book or the paper — ten minutes, no ceremony — reading is a people thing.

Try saying: "I'm going to sit here with my book next to yours for ten minutes."

One idea to close on

If you keep one sentence from all of this: consistency beats duration. The real obstacle is almost never willingness — it's the 8:40 p.m. question of what to read tonight. Anything that removes that friction works, from a stack of library books to personalized stories for kids you can have ready in a minute.

The PISA results describe a fifteen-year trend across 91 countries. You're not going to move that from your living room, and nobody is asking you to. What is entirely in your hands is whether, tonight, there are ten minutes of someone reading to a child. That's enough, and it's a lot.