During the confinement due to COVID-19, the educational centers tried to cope as much as possible with the continuity of the teaching-learning processes. In this research, it was tried to verify if the implementation of a proposal that promoted reading among secondary school students of a science subject, characteristic to improve their learning as well as benefit their mental health. The comparison of the results obtained in a test before and after carrying out the proposal confirmed that there was an improvement in learning and a perception of therapeutic effects of reading in this difficult situation. It is necessary to continue carrying out proposals of this type, even without being subjected to situations of anxiety and stress, in order to improve both learning and the mental health of students.
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In recent years, and as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been contradictory data about people's reading habits. And if you pay attention to what happened worldwide with reading during confinement, you see that although there are cases in which it seems that the percentage of readers and time dedicated to reading increased (Sun et al., 2021), there are cases in which this increase only occurred in the first weeks (Reimer et al., 2021), and in other cases it can be affirmed that the number of readers and time dedicated to reading has decreased considerably (Ardington et al., 2021).
In the particular case of Spain, the reading competence of Spaniards continues to give stagnant values and well below the average of the rest of the OECD countries, in its latest report: Skills Outlook 2021: learning for life (OECD, 2021). And if 57% of Spaniards read frequently during the state of alarm, the reading rate hardly grew in 2020 (Morales, 2021). The Spanish recognize reading as the third resource, behind watching television and talking on the phone, that helps the most in quarantine; but it goes to ninth place when asked about the activities they have carried out in quarantine (Conecta, 2020). Another study carried out among the adult population carried out by the University of Valencia and the University of Salamanca (ERI-Lectura, 2020), concludes that, individually, between 39.9 and 47. 9% had a reading frequency similar to before the pandemic, while between 8.8 and 27.4% decreased. On the other hand, the greatest increases occurred in social reading (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.) with 46.1%, and 45.3% of the sample increased their leisure reading frequency (novels, comics, magazines or blogs) during confinement.