The OECD released the results of PISA 2025 on Tuesday, and they are the bleakest in the program's history: average reading and mathematics performance across member countries has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded by the assessment, which this year tested 760,000 fifteen-year-olds in 91 countries and economies. The report pays unusually close attention to how students use digital tools and AI — and its findings are uncomfortable reading for the edtech industry. For continued coverage of how AI is reshaping education and society, keep up with the latest AI news updates on our homepage.
One in Five Students Now a Low Performer
Across OECD countries, one in five 15-year-olds is now a low performer in all three core subjects — science, mathematics and reading — up from 16 percent in the previous 2022 cycle, according to the OECD's published results.
The decline is measured in school years, not decimal points. Average reading scores across OECD countries fell 28 points between 2015 and 2025, which the OECD estimates is equivalent to about one and a half years of learning. Mathematics fell 22 points over the same period, just over one year of learning. Among non-OECD participants, reading dropped 16 points and mathematics 8 points.
Science, the focus subject of the 2025 cycle, held comparatively stable between 2022 and 2025 — though only after trending downward between 2009 and 2022.
Students Who Skip AI Drafting Outscore Those Who Use It
The report's AI findings are already generating headlines. According to the OECD results and coverage by The Wall Street Journal and other outlets, students who said they did not use AI to draft text for writing assignments outperformed students who said they did.
But the picture is not uniformly anti-AI. Among frequent AI users, students who used the tools to help them learn — and who had been taught how to assess the quality of AI-generated information — tended to perform better than frequent users who received no such guidance. The distinction the OECD draws is between AI as a substitute for thinking and AI as a supplement to it.
OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann put it directly in the report's launch materials: "Technology and AI can strengthen learning and help prepare young people for the future, but only when used purposefully and not as a substitute for attention, effort and understanding."
Digital Distraction Is Contagious
One of the report's most striking findings concerns not the students holding the devices, but the ones sitting next to them. More than one in four students said classmates were distracted by digital devices in most or every science lesson. Students surrounded by distracted peers performed less well, were less engaged in learning, and reported feeling less connected to their school — evidence that classroom phone and laptop use imposes costs well beyond the individual user.
The report also points to a decline in deep reading. The share of "superficial readers" — students who skim texts and jump to incorrect conclusions — has risen, and analysts cited in coverage by Germany's heise online suspect a link with fast-paced social media feeds that reward skimming over sustained attention. That matters beyond literature class: the OECD stresses that reading literacy is a prerequisite for learning in every other subject, including finding and evaluating information online.
The Gaps Are Shifting in the Wrong Direction
Socio-economic background remains one of the strongest predictors of performance. Advantaged students scored 85 points higher in science than disadvantaged students across the OECD. The gap narrowed slightly since 2022 — but largely because advantaged students performed worse, not because disadvantaged students caught up.
At the top of the tables, most participating Chinese jurisdictions, together with Estonia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Chinese Taipei and the United Kingdom, ranked among the ten highest-performing systems in all three subjects, with Singapore topping reading and ranking second in mathematics and science. A minority of systems bucked the downward trend entirely: science performance rose in Lithuania, the Slovak Republic, Türkiye, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Macao (China), Montenegro, Qatar, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay.
Germany illustrates the cumulative slide in national coverage of the results: its average scores fell to 486 in science, 465 in reading and 464 in mathematics — down from 492, 480 and 475 in 2022, and below its levels from the very first PISA cycle in 2000. French media reported the country recorded its lowest mathematics scores ever.
What Comes Next
PISA 2025 introduced a new assessment domain, "Learning in the Digital World," testing self-regulated learning and computational problem solving with digital tools. Early results show almost two-thirds of students reached the relevant proficiency in computational problem solving — but only half of those could also demonstrate basic proficiency in science, reading and mathematics. Full results from that domain are not expected until 2027, alongside a foreign language assessment due in April.
The policy debate the report will fuel is already visible: whether schools should restrict devices outright, teach AI literacy as a guardrail, or both. What the OECD's own data shows is that neither abstinence nor uncritical adoption served students well in this cycle — the best-performing AI users were the ones who had been taught to check its work.
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