Too much text. PISA Report. Cartoon from 14 September 2026 in CTXT
Spain achieved one of the worst educational results in the history of the PISA report, although this downward trend is a global phenomenon, with a general decline in the reading and maths performance of 15-year-old students.
There isn’t a single media outlet that hasn’t consulted various experts or people involved in the report, and depending on where you read about it, the situation seems more or less serious.
Whilst, according to the OECD, Spanish pupils, like those in other countries, struggle to maintain their attention and carry out complex intellectual tasks such as critical reading, this is not in all cases directly or solely attributed to prolonged and/or excessive screen use for leisure purposes and artificial intelligence as the cause of poor academic performance.
As this isn’t my area of expertise, all I can do is invite you to read the report so that you can decide for yourselves whether the glass is half full, half empty or broken.
Let us not forget the mystery surrounding the 2018 PISA report, in which ‘unplausible response behaviour’ was detected. Spanish 15-year-olds took less than 25 seconds to answer 20 questions, whilst pupils from other countries took between 50 seconds and 2 minutes; furthermore, in some schools, a pattern was detected whereby all questions were answered either ‘yes ’ or ‘no’.
In 2020, the OECD ruled out technical errors in the analysis and attributed these alleged ‘anomalies’ to a lack of interest and motivation, and to the pupils’ fatigue halfway through their final exams.
