After a long week filled with assignments and stressful tests, sophomore Liani Ragade curls up on a nice, warm couch to read the library book that has been sitting untouched on her desk since she checked it out last week. She only has an hour to immerse herself in another world far away and free from outside distractions.
However, in another house just a few blocks away, sophomore Anisha Shetty settles down on her bed after digging through her backpack and fishes out her phone. Instead of reading a book, Shetty scrolls on Instagram, a weekend activity that has subconsciously become part of her routine. She isn’t alone; a growing number of young adults and teenagers are losing their ability to focus long enough to read and resort to social media as a source of entertainment.
A generation loses focus
National testing data confirms a trend many teachers have observed — a decline in traditional literacy skills. According to the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 12th-grade reading scores have reached their lowest point since 1992, with approximately one-third of high school seniors performing below basic comprehension levels. As students increasingly rely on digital media and artificial intelligence, researchers suggest this shift is creating a gap in the foundational skills required to analyze complex, long-form texts.
Laura Sterponi, a professor of language, literacy and culture at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an email to The Campanile that the definition of literacy is shifting to include more than just physical books.
“Traditionally, being literate meant being able to decode and comprehend written text, especially in print,” Sterponi wrote. “Nowadays, literacy also includes fluency with multimodal texts, which combine image, sound and design, not just alphabetic text. In addition, our everyday reading and writing is increasingly carried out in interactional contexts — decoding is connected with commenting, sharing and remixing.”
Sterponi also wrote in her email that the ability to interpret traditional books is still a necessary skill in an increasingly digital world.
“The ability to engage deeply with sustained, complex texts — to follow arguments and interpret nuance — remains crucial and, in some ways, even more important now,” Sterponi wrote. “The challenge for education is not to choose between them but to support students in developing all of these capacities.”
Despite the nationwide literacy decline, Palo Alto Unified School District still outperforms other school districts across Santa Clara County. In the 2024-25 California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, 82.26% of PAUSD students met or exceeded their English Language Arts/Literacy grade-level standards. In contrast, 59.82% of Santa Clara County students met or exceeded those standards.
Despite this seemingly successful PAUSD data, senior Kathryn Chen said it has become much easier for students to skip assigned reading with the rise of tools such as AI and online book summaries.
“You can get away with looking like you read and thought about the book without actually practicing those skills,” Chen said. “It has become easier because there’s a resource that synthesizes so many different interpretations and observations from the text for you.”
But Chen said relying on these shortcuts impedes student learning.
“I’m not going to say you’re wrong to do it because I get it, but I do think that it is important, especially with AP Literature and AP Language, because you chose to take those classes,” Chen said. “If you’re only using the AI summary or SparkNotes summary to read the book, you’re not actually engaging your mind or thinking about what the author did; that goes against the benefits you’re supposed to be getting by taking the class.”
Sarah Freedman, a University of California, Berkeley professor who specializes in writing and English in educational settings and is a former adviser for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, said to help students in their reading skills, schools should focus on teaching students how to use AI tools effectively rather than as a shortcut.
“Because these new tools are available, teachers have to be alert to them,” Freedman said. “Kids will use them, so we need to teach kids how to use them well, as opposed to using them as crutches.”
For AP English Language and Composition and Literature of Visual Media teacher Alanna Williamson the gap between students who read a summary versus the students who read the book becomes obvious during class discussions.
“I can often tell that they didn’t understand what the reading was saying,” Williamson said. “Whether that’s due to them not actually reading it fully or them legitimately not having the skill, either way, it’s a noticeable difference.”
Williamson also said students have become less interested in reading for class.
“I got a lot more pushback this year about the reading in AP Language and Composition and Literature of Visual Media,” Williamson said. “I can tell that students are not always reading because of the way that they annotate or fake annotations. Even when they are reading, their comprehension has gotten worse based on how they do on reading assessments and our conversations in class.”
English and Advancement Via Individual Determination teacher Lizzie DeKraai also said students seem to have a harder time sticking with difficult books than they used to.
“They don’t want to do it,” DeKraai said. “They won’t do it. They avoid difficult, complex texts. There’s also a lack of reading stamina and ability to really stick with the text and push through and also an unwillingness to try to use strategies to comprehend a text that they don’t automatically get.”
These teachers’ experience mirrors a decline in reading stamina and interest nationwide. A 2025 study by researchers from the University of Florida and University College London found reading for pleasure has dropped 40% in the last 20 years. In 2004, nearly 30% of Americans read for fun on a daily basis. By 2023, that number had fallen to just 16%.
Sterponi from UC Berkeley wrote in her email that the issue may not be students have stopped reading entirely, but rather that they are spending more time on shorter, digital content.
“If we are thinking of sustained engagement with long-form texts — novels, academic articles — then there is evidence that many students are doing less of that and teachers are asking less of that,” Sterponi wrote. “At the same time, students are constantly engaged with texts in different formats — messages, social media, multimodal content … What is changing is the temporal structure of attention, the kind of texts, and the purposes of reading.”
Freedman also said today’s digital environment has changed the ways students use their attention.
“They attend to a lot of things at once,” Freedman said. “Some people see that as jumping around and not focusing, and other people see that as an ability that kids have. I don’t worry about the digital world and kids reading and writing.”
And Sterponi wrote that people today develop skills that previous generations did not.
“What’s interesting today is that students move between these contexts constantly,” Sterponi wrote. “They are developing multiple reading repertoires: one attuned to speed, multimodal texts and social signaling — often on digital platforms — and another oriented toward depth, coherence and analytical rigor, often in academic settings.”
The move toward digital media, she notes, has trained students to prioritize fast information intake, which makes the slower process of reading a book feel unnatural.
“Social media environments shape reading by encouraging speed and responsiveness,” Sterponi wrote. “Students learn to scan quickly, pick up cues and react in real time. Social media also normalizes fragmentation — texts are shorter, interlinked and multimodal, so meaning is often assembled across snippets rather than developed linearly.”
Distractions and shortcuts lead to less reading
While traditional literacy loss is apparent to some, the reasons behind the loss are nuanced and diverse, but among the reasons experts cite are the rapid growth of digital media, AI and the busy lives of students.
A 2026 study from Powers Health found that since the COVID-19 pandemic, students’ access to technology has spiked, leading to a subsequent increase in screen time. Jamie Nunez, the senior manager of outreach and learning at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit which provides ratings and reviews of digital media, said he has seen an increase in educational technology use since the pandemic.
A 2025 College Board study found over 80% of students report using AI in classes. And Williamson said to avoid school-assigned reading, some students use AI summaries. She said this reliance has recently become more pronounced.
“Last year, it was a problem, but not as much,” Williamson said, whereas this year, (it’s) a constant problem and a constant conflict for students because they’re getting different messages from different teachers about what … is OK. I think it’s also just better technology this year, and it’s more readily available.”
For some, the decline in literacy can be attributed to the rise in social media. According to a 2025 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, adolescents who use social media perform worse on reading, vocabulary and memory tests compared to adolescents who do not.
Chen said she sees this play out in her life as she only reads books if she finds them more engaging than her social media feed.
“I care more that my book has something interesting in it,” Chen said. “Unless the book is actually good, then I start to lose interest a lot faster because if I’m getting the same experience as just randomly scrolling, why am I reading the book?”
But while people still read when interacting with social media posts, junior Maya Angela Cheng said the form and quality of literacy is different.
“People read the text on social media, but I don’t think reading 10 bursts of 10 words is going to get you the same effect as reading 100 words all put together,” Cheng said. “The number of words could hypothetically be the same, but I don’t think you’re getting the same learning or higher-level thinking or critical thinking that you would from reading a longer thing.”
In addition to distractions, Chen said students also approach reading with the wrong mindset.
“There’s this idea that you don’t have time to read, especially with the mentality that you have to finish the whole book in one go,” Chen said. “It’s also so much easier to do social media. Books can be heavy, or you have to go buy it or go to the library. That’s more work than opening your phone.”
Since many students take a rigorous course load in addition to their multiple extracurriculars, history teacher Katya Villalobos said these students’ schedules allow little time for leisure or reading.
“Their schedules are packed, whether it be school, sports, outside activities, family life, everything that makes up your life,” Villalobos said. “That doesn’t help, and also because I do think that a lot of students are focusing on a lot of the social online stuff, that they may read snippets here and there, but it’s not consistent.”
Cheng said the increase in course load from middle school to high school left less time for her to read.
“In middle school, I would read a lot more for fun,” Cheng said. “Schoolwork was definitely less of a barrier just because there wasn’t as much of it. Nowadays, you have to do schoolwork to be on top of your grades, to get practice in. So as a result, that became a bigger barrier against me being able to read just for leisure.”
The loss of literacy diminishes critical thinking
While a decline in reading may seem insignificant, students and adults alike say the implications for such a decline can be grave.
A 2025 study published in the journal iScience analyzed data from 2003 to 2023 and found that daily time spent reading for pleasure in the U.S. has decreased consistently at a rate of around 3% per year.
Sophomore Megan Murphy-Chutorian said she has noticed how a decrease in the amount of time her classmates spend reading has led to a downward trend in their reading skills.
“It’s extremely disappointing how bad some people are at reading, and reading out loud especially,” Murphy-Chutorian said. “I don’t really know what caused this, because personally, I remember learning how to read out loud in kindergarten, but I think it is a skill that many people are losing and should probably be rectified soon.”
Murphy-Chutorian also said students’ dependence on technology is apparent in the quality of their work.
“During discussions or essays, you don’t have a lot to actually go off of,” Murphy-Chutorian said. “You have to go off of certain things you were given from AI and you have to stick to it more, so you’re thinking a lot less and the analysis is probably not as in-depth.”
Hilary McDaniel, who teaches the Early Childhood Development Pathway, said AI tools are harmful for brain development.
“I have serious reservations about the health of it, about how it impacts the developing brain,” McDaniel said. “All the things that I would have been concerned about social media, but then times 100.”
Additionally, English learner specialist and literacy teacher on special assignment Kindel Launer said a decline in literacy can lead to impaired attention spans and poor time management; when students cannot hold focus, Launer said they read only in short segments.
“Currently, most students appear to lack the skill to sustain attention over time,” Launer said. “When you can’t sustain attention, that fragmentation makes (reading take) longer and longer, so students aren’t as efficient.”
Maryanne Wolf, the director of University of California, Los Angeles’s Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice, wrote in an email to The Campanile that research suggests literacy is crucial to develop the ability to think analytically.
“We now have extraordinary evidence for why every adolescent should rethink how deep reading can help them build their own cognitive processes,” Wolf wrote in the email. “Furthermore, the time-and effort-demanding processes used in deep reading represent an act of resistance against a culture that invisibly robs them of their attention and oh-so-subtly changes their ability to think for themselves.”
DeKraai said she fears students’ lack of reading will make their future lives difficult.
“What worries me the most is the lack of critical thinking,” DeKraai said. “Nobody has ever come to school super excited to read the assigned reading. However, you do it because you’re practicing the skill, and you’re learning more about the world and your place in it. I really worry that students are going to go out into the world where the lines are blurring between truth and fiction, and they won’t be able to understand what is real because they’re relying on artificial intelligence that is sycophantic, hallucinatory and inaccurate.”
Focus can be rebuilt through discipline
Despite the national decline in reading and reading scores, some local teachers and students are finding ways to combat these trends. Librarian Sima Thomas said she encourages people to download e-books or audiobooks to their phone so they can read instead of using social media. Additionally, she recommends setting a timer while reading or a specific reading goal.
And despite some students’ unwillingness, DeKraai said she tries to push her classes to read and interact with the text more.
“We do a reading quiz and reading log almost every day,” DeKraai said. “That’s one of the ways that I’m trying to fight it: doing the golden lines, really trying to get students off tech, physically touching the book, talking about the book, trying to make the connections clear between your life and the text and why it matters, and being really explicit about why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
To help students pick up a book again later, English teacher Mimi Park said she schedules in-class reading time.
“I do like giving a little bit of time in class to start the reading, to at least get a little bit of it done so that it’s easier for our students to continue on,” Park said.
Chen said she fights distractions when she is reading by limiting her technology.
“I definitely do lose focus, especially when I’m reading for school, because it’s not necessarily what I want to be reading,” Chen said. “So I use focus apps like Focus Friend so I can’t access the rest of my phone for a certain amount of time, or I’ll put my phone in another room.”
For students who struggle with focus, Thomas said it’s possible to improve attention span.
“We know that a lot of the short form, social media, YouTube content damages our ability to focus on something for a long period of time, but reading a book actually rebuilds that focus, because you are focusing on this one narrative that is built and developed over time,” Thomas said.
Ultimately, even in today’s digital world, Chen said she thinks reading still serves a purpose.
“It helps you be more aware of the power of words, not just the written word, but speeches and conversations,” Chen said. “It helps you actively think about what’s being put in front of you, pick up on what’s given to you and apply your own logic and analysis so you can come to your own conclusion. Being able to practice that skill is so important when it’s getting even easier to just have opinions given to you instead of forming your own.”
