PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

tokai

Great. With later and later retirement dates, its important that the younger generations are easier to compete with. /s

a2ff6eeb0

Makes sense. The kids can see that education isn't really going to be a sellable skill when AI ends up coming into full force. AI already writes most of the articles I see posted here, is doing math at the level of the best mathematicians, and is writing a ton of the code out there. Given another decade to develop, the kids will be hitting the workforce with very stiff competition. It's not a shock they're putting their energy elsewhere, and I can't say they're wrong. They may be the first generation who grow up fully catered to by AI.

nntwozz

At Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg Sweden 80% of the students would pass the entrance exam in the 60s. These days it's reversed, only 20% pass. I was told this was the case around 2005 when I studied there. The exam has not changed in difficulty.

lordnacho

The decline seems to have started in the 2010s. Makes me wonder if this is connected to Jon Haidt's ideas about the impact of social media.

kmitz

PISA data show that students who use AI for specific schoolwork tasks, such as summarising texts, drafting or conducting research, attain lower scores in science than students who do not use AI. See graphs on PISA 2025 homepage : https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers. Seriously, this should be a major signal to keep screens and AI solutions out of classrooms. That's not solving everything but at least students would be given a few hours window of de-brainroting everyday. I'm open to accept that AI can have a positive impact on education but people and tools are apparently not ready and for the moment using it is a net negative.

blululu

Framing this as a pattern across the entire industrial world is a bit misleading. Looking through the data at Math Scores since 2015 shows big country level split: Japan: -3 S Korea: -1 Singapore: +1 Taiwan: +9 --- Germany: -45 France: -38 Sweden: -33 US: -10 This is an issue with the western industrialized world. Which ought to make the analysis simple since we can look at what those countries have done differently than their East Asian counterparts and stop pursing those actions as national policy *edit for formatting

rayiner

The U.S. scores are interesting. On page 28, look at the column that says "Share of top performers" (in science, reading or mathematics): https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report... . The U.S. is at 17.8% top performers, well behind Japan and Korea but around the same as Canada and Switzerland. But the U.S. is significantly ahead of the big EU countries: Germany is at 14%, France is at 9.8%, Italy is at 10.1% and Spain is at 7%.

Zadak

You think parents off-loading parenting to YouTube brainrot since 2014-2015 might have something to do with this? No, it must be SOCIAL MEDIA.

rawgabbit

Quote PISA 2025 was the largest assessment to date, involving 760 000 students across 91 countries and economies. What were the sample sizes in previous years and their related demographics?

HNSheldonImpost

Because illegal immigration, Tiktok, and "AI".

gonzalohm

Anecdotal, but in Spain kids don't take these tests seriously. I remember when we were in school we would ask if the tests counted towards the final note for the subject and they didn't so we would just basically finish asap so we could do other things. And I think this wasn't a "just my class" kind of thing.

logifail

"English pupils have pulled ahead of the rest of the UK in international reading, maths and science tests, new data suggests, with Scotland and Wales falling further behind." Appreciate this stuff gets political very quickly, but I'm curious what did England do that Scotland and Wales did not do (or vice versa)?

somenameforme

IQ scores in most of the Western world began reversing sometime from the 90s to early 00s. [1] That link is for the US but similar stuff has also been observed in most of every Western/OECD nation. By contrast they're still rapidly increasing in the 'Global South'. You'd expect this to manifest in reduced test scores and reduced quality of outcomes across a breadth of fields over time paired with the inverse happening in countries seeing gains. And that does not seem inaccurate. Why this is, is an interesting question but it hits on too many taboo topics. Though perhaps rational discussion becoming taboo is itself a part of the reason. When you accept reality, whatever it gives you, you're obviously going to have a far more rational population and better outcomes than one that insists on bending reality to fit a desired narrative, even when it obviously does not. After all this is precisely what brought Greater Arabia from the center of education and learning in the world to rather the opposite. It wasn't religion, but letting ideology dominate reality instead of the other way around. [1] - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...

charlieyu1

Hong Kong crashed hard and nobody could see why /s

piokoch

Yup, this is "inclusive education" effects, predicted long time ago by education experts. Kids with special needs (from handicapped to criminals) are thrown into regular schools and classes, making education totally inefficient. In Poland one of the best on the World system of special education is being demolished in the name of this absurdity. But this is what people voted for.

aennassiri

This is alarming. I believe it is probably a combination of several factors: - Social media and doomscrolling without sufficient parental controls: Several OECD countries are already addressing this by introducing or considering restrictions on teenagers’ access to social media. - App UX/UI: Many apps are designed to compete for our attention, which can gradually reduce our ability to sustain focus. - LLMs: The impact of AI is more recent and still needs to be properly assessed. However, LLMs could significantly affect attention and critical thinking for both adults and children, especially as we increasingly delegate parts of our thinking to AI models. - Changes in the education system: In France, for example, mathematics was removed as a mandatory subject for some high-school tracks for a period of time. In my view, that was a major mistake. - COVID-19: Many students experienced significant gaps in their education during the pandemic, with the effects often being more pronounced among students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

jakozaur

The drop is not uniform; see Table I.2.6 (2022 -> 2025). Focusing on math: Stable, above OECD average: Taiwan, Macao, Korea, Estonia, United Kingdom, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, New Zealand Stable, around or below OECD average: United States, Slovakia, Greece, Croatia, Qatar, Montenegro, Mongolia, Mexico, Brunei Dropping, previously above OECD average: Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Slovenia, Latvia, Portugal, Norway, Spain, France, Hungary Dropping, around or below OECD average: Iceland, Israel, Malta, Serbia, Chile, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Malaysia, Romania, Peru, Ukraine, North Macedonia Improving, all below OECD average: Türkiye, Thailand, UAE, Philippines, Jordan, Georgia, Cambodia

delis-thumbs-7e

Here’s my five cents: It’s the damn phone. I do think that in the future we have classified today’s platform company app’s as digital drugs (similar to in addictiveness to gambling) and wonder why in the hell people let their kids get hooked on digital heroin from early age. Kids talking about brain rot are describing a real phenomenon. In Finland in 2016 (Nr. 1 in the early 2000’s) there was a reform towards what I believe is called constructivism in pedagogy, ie. kids learn by themselves and the teacher simply facilitates learning, there should be play and games as way to learn etc. There’s no evidence any of this works, but you don’t need as many teachers nor as qualified, so that’s good right? Besides, their new iPads will this them. This is an Apple/Google/whatever school now. Who needs text books? I think we simply threw a generation of kids under the buss to sell each other toys and dumb software and to keep bunch of VC’s in San Fran happy. Education started to decline, because as a society we stopped caring about education.