A Psychological Analysis of the PISA 2025 Results and the Question Bulgaria Can No Longer Afford to Postpone

Dr. Antonina Kardasheva
Psychologist, psychotherapist, and expert in emotional intelligence

Whenever the results of the latest international PISA assessment are released, we tend to start the same conversation. “Our students do not know enough. Teachers are not teaching well enough. Curricula are overloaded. Children do not read. Their phones are distracting them. Parents are not involved enough. The education system needs to be reformed.” All of these statements contain some truth.

But in my view, we are overlooking a much deeper question: What is the psychological process of a child’s development during the school years?

Because PISA does not simply assess how much information a 15-year-old student has memorized. It assesses something far more important - whether the student is able to use knowledge when faced with an unfamiliar situation. In fact, it assesses their adaptability to a new environment and how actively and effectively they use their cognitive and emotional resources.

In this sense, the results lead us to the following questions: Can a student read a text and understand its meaning? Can they distinguish what is essential from what is not? Can they connect information from different sources? Can they formulate a hypothesis? Can they stay engaged with a complex problem long enough without giving up? Can they apply mathematical knowledge to a real-life situation? Can they reason based on evidence? Can they think critically?

And this is precisely where the psychological conversation about PISA results begins. Because behind each of these questions lies more than knowledge. There are numerous psychological processes involved, such as attention, curiosity, motivation, self-regulation, perseverance in the face of difficulty, cognitive flexibility, emotional resilience, confidence, the ability to delay gratification, tolerance for mistakes, and the ability to think independently.

In this context, PISA results should be interpreted not only as an assessment of a national education system, but also as a psychological analysis of the way an education system has taught its children how to learn and develop psychologically.

The New Signal from PISA 2025

The latest results no longer allow the problem to be explained solely by the pandemic. Across OECD countries, between 2015 and 2025, the average mathematics score fell by 22 points, while the average reading score declined by 28 points. The OECD describes the results as evidence of a continuing decline in educational performance, particularly severe in reading.

The picture in Bulgaria is even more concerning. In PISA 2025, Bulgarian students once again perform below the average in all three areas - mathematics, reading, and science. Only 43% reach at least the baseline proficiency Level 2 in mathematics, compared with an OECD average of 65%. In science, 53% reach the baseline proficiency level, compared with an OECD average of 74%. Only around 2% of Bulgarian students are among the highest performers in science, and around 3% in mathematics.

Even more important is the trend. Compared with 2015, the share of Bulgarian students performing below the baseline proficiency level has increased by 15 percentage points in mathematics, 17 in reading, and 10 in science.

This means that we are not witnessing a temporary decline. We are witnessing a persistent pattern of insufficient skills development.

The question that may be most relevant at this point is:

“What is it about the way we teach children that fails to sufficiently develop their ability to think and grow?”

The Paradox of Bulgarian Education

The Bulgarian school system has a peculiar paradox. Children spend an enormous number of hours absorbing academic content. They have textbooks, homework, oral examinations, written tests, assessments, grades, and private tutoring. And yet, when they are required to use their knowledge in a new context, many of them struggle.

This points to a fundamental difference between two cognitive processes: absorbing information and being able to think critically and use that information.

Traditional education often rewards the correct answer to the question: “What did you remember, and what do you know?” Yet the modern world, through assessments such as PISA, increasingly demands an answer to a different question: “What can you do with what you know?”

Part of the problem with Bulgarian education lies precisely in the space between these two questions. Long-term memory does not retain knowledge through the passive accumulation of information. When learning becomes a process of reproduction, it fails to inspire students or engage them emotionally.

Learning as a process requires not only absorbing information, but also processing it, making connections, retrieving knowledge, testing hypotheses, making mistakes, and transferring knowledge to new contexts. If a student repeatedly hears in the classroom, “Remember this because I’m going to test you on it,” they naturally optimize their behaviour around that task. They learn the lesson. They reproduce it. They receive a grade. They forget a significant part of it.

But if the curriculum is built around questions that require critical thinking and self-awareness - “Why?” “How did you reach that conclusion?” “Is there another way?” “How would you use this knowledge?” “What evidence do you have?” “What would happen if we changed the conditions?” - the student begins to develop a different cognitive architecture.

They do not simply memorize. Instead, they actively participate in the process, think, engage emotionally with the subject, experience it, and identify the most appropriate strategy to support their argument.

PISA Results Measure Something We Rarely Discuss - the Level of Psychological Endurance in the Thinking Process

There is one aspect of PISA that, in my view, deserves far more attention.

Imagine a 15-year-old student faced with a complex problem. They do not immediately understand how to solve it. What do they do? Do they try again? Do they reread the task? Do they look for a different approach? Can they tolerate their own confusion and recognize a way forward? Or, at the first sign of difficulty, do they internally decide: “I can’t do this. I don’t know.”

In this context, we cannot talk only about mathematics. We are talking about psychological processes - self-regulation and resilience in the face of cognitive difficulty, and the level of psychological endurance.

And the data for Bulgaria are particularly interesting. PISA 2025 reports a curiosity index among Bulgarian students below the OECD average, along with lower indicators for persistence and help-seeking. Only around half say they make an extra effort when their work becomes difficult, while the proportion of students who say they finish what they have started even when it becomes boring is among the lowest across the education systems surveyed.

This is an extremely important finding.

Because education should not develop knowledge alone. It should also develop psychological resilience - the ability to remain engaged in the learning process when learning becomes difficult.

PISA Results and the Missing Element in the Learning Process - Emotional Intelligence

One of the major flaws in the traditional understanding of education is the assumption that cognitive and emotional processes can be separated. A child does not leave their emotions at the classroom door. They bring them in, and throughout the school day they try to connect their emotions with their thinking - often unsuccessfully, because they are not given space to feel. Students hear: “Pay attention! Look here! Stop it! Be quiet!” No one asks them: “How do you feel?”

Fear of making mistakes affects thinking. The fear of making mistakes is activated in students who are searching for the correct answer rather than for a solution or an opportunity to express their own opinion. In many educational environments, mistakes continue to carry a negative psychological meaning. A mistake means: “You don’t know.” “You didn’t prepare.” “You’re not good enough.”

But in genuine learning through critical thinking, a mistake means something different: “My thinking has not yet reached the solution.”

That difference is enormous. When students are afraid of making mistakes, they begin to avoid risk rather than learn how to manage it. When they avoid risk, they choose what is familiar. And when they choose only what is familiar, they struggle to develop flexible critical thinking and the confidence to express and defend their own ideas.

There is more. Anxiety affects working memory. A sense of incompetence affects motivation. The relationship with the teacher affects a student’s willingness to ask questions and can manifest itself as communication anxiety. A sense of belonging affects participation. The ability to regulate frustration affects whether a student will continue working on a difficult problem.

Yet PISA tasks very often require exactly the opposite - entering an unfamiliar situation, constructing an independent solution, and providing evidence to support it. Emotional intelligence, understood as the ability to recognize and regulate one’s emotional resources, is therefore not an “add-on” to academic education. It is one of the psychological foundations upon which academic learning is built.

The Attention Deficit Crisis Is Becoming a Learning Crisis

The PISA 2025 results raise another major question for education - the digital environment. In Bulgaria, students report an average of around 2.2 hours per day using digital devices for leisure while at school, approximately twice the OECD average. Around 42% say that their classmates are often distracted by digital devices during most or all science lessons, compared with an OECD average of 28%.

Bulgarian students who report this kind of distraction score, on average, 12 PISA points lower in science after accounting for their socio-economic profile.

This is not simply a problem with phones. It is a problem with the architecture of attention - a crucial cognitive process that underpins the stability of memory processes. The digital environment gradually trains the brain to expect rapid change, short bursts of stimulation, immediate rewards, and constant novelty.

Learning, however, requires almost the exact opposite: sustained and focused attention, delayed gratification of the need for quick success, postponed pleasure, working through difficulty, repetition, depth, and assertiveness. This is why future educational programmes need to develop children’s ability to understand when technology supports thinking and when it interrupts it.

Artificial intelligence can be a remarkable educational tool - but only when it supports thinking rather than replaces it. PISA 2025 already provides some very interesting initial international signals in this direction. Students who use AI for specific learning tasks, such as summarising texts, writing, or conducting preliminary research, show lower average science performance than students who do not use it for these purposes. The OECD, however, emphasises that the relationship is complex: moderate overall use of AI does not show the same pattern, while students who receive education in AI literacy may demonstrate better outcomes.

In Bulgaria, 41% of students use AI chatbots for learning at least once a week. Around 29% use them to summarise texts they were expected to read themselves, while around 30% use them to generate text for written assignments.

This raises one of the most important questions facing education today: When AI thinks instead of the child, what psychological process is the child actually developing?

Our task cannot be to ban AI. But neither can it be simply to bring AI into the classroom. We need to teach children how to build an intelligent partnership with technology - when to use it, when to question it, and when to consciously think without it.

One of Bulgaria’s Most Concerning Indicators Has Nothing to Do with the Curriculum

In 2025, around 48% of Bulgarian students reported that they had missed at least one full day of school in the two weeks preceding the assessment. The OECD average was 22%. Another 42% had missed at least one class.

This cannot be viewed solely as a disciplinary problem. We should be asking: Why are so many children becoming psychologically disengaged from school?

Absence is sometimes physical. But there is another kind of absence. The child is sitting in the classroom, but their attention is elsewhere. They see no meaning in what they are doing. They do not feel ready to participate in the lesson. They experience no curiosity. They do not connect what they are learning with their own lives and emotional experiences. And this leads to one of the most dangerous states in education: a body that is present and a mind that is absent.

Discipline is, in fact, a psychological indicator of the quality and attractiveness of the environment. Thirty-four percent of Bulgarian students say they cannot work well in most or all science lessons, while 41% report noise and disorder. And 47% say that their classmates do not listen to the teacher.

Again, I would be cautious about drawing the simplistic conclusion: “Children today are undisciplined.” Behaviour, just like emotions, is information. It may indicate a lack of engagement, insufficient self-regulation, a loss of meaning, social dynamics, difficulties in relationships, or an educational environment that is unable to sustain attention.

Discipline, therefore, should not be understood merely as control over behaviour. True educational discipline is the gradually developed ability of a child to manage their own attention, emotions, impulses, effort, and behaviour in pursuit of a chosen goal. Yes, you read that correctly. The lack of a clear goal in our education system is another fundamental problem.

There is another result from the assessment that we should not overlook. The difference in science performance between the most socio-economically advantaged and the most disadvantaged quarter of Bulgarian students is 101 points, compared with an OECD average of 85 points. Socio-economic status accounts for around 14% of the variation in performance.

This means that schools are still not doing enough to compensate for children’s unequal starting points and, most importantly, to develop a sense of belonging rather than a sense of difference. And this is precisely one of the most powerful functions of education: the place where you are born should not determine the limits of what you can become.

The role of the family, which is gradually becoming more distant from the learning process, is another important topic for discussion. PISA reports that in 2025, 60% of Bulgarian students said their parents asked them at least once a week what they had done at school. In 2022, the figure was 68%. Only 47% talk to their parents at least once a week about problems at school, compared with 57% in 2022.

These figures should remind us of something very important: education is never a process solely between the student and the school. It is a process of building and developing a sustainable, long-term ecosystem: Child – Family – Teacher – Peers – Culture – Digital Environment – and now, Artificial Intelligence.

In my view, this is precisely where the new conversation about Bulgarian education should begin - by shifting the perspective from “What does the child know?” to “What kind of person are we helping the child become?”

Simply adding more educational content, introducing another textbook, or adding yet another test to assess knowledge will not change the system. A new ecosystem begins with a commitment to developing new skills, abilities, and competencies in students that enable them to learn, think, and adapt to the dynamics of the world ahead.

I would highlight several key areas for development:

Deep reading comprehension - extracting meaning, interpreting, comparing, and constructing arguments.

Critical thinking - applying knowledge to real-world problems.

Emotional intelligence - developing the ability to recognize, understand, name, express, and regulate emotions as the foundation of self-regulation and relationships.

Metacognition - enabling children not only to know what they think, but gradually to understand how they think and how they learn.

Resilience in the face of difficulty - developing the ability to stay with a problem when the solution does not come immediately.

Creative thinking - asking questions, evaluating information, and generating alternatives.

Digital competence - developing the ability to understand when technology expands human potential and when it begins to replace it.

If we view PISA results as feedback, we will understand that they point towards the direction in which education systems need to change.

Children adapt to the environment that we, as adults, have created for them. If the environment rewards reproduction, they will reproduce. If it rewards grades, they will learn for grades. If making a mistake brings shame, they will avoid mistakes. If a phone provides a stronger stimulus than a lesson, their attention will shift to the phone. If AI can do the thinking for them in seconds, some children will hand that work over to it.

But if school creates curiosity, psychological safety, emotional intelligence, intellectual challenge, meaningful relationships, purpose, and autonomy, children begin to develop an entirely different relationship with knowledge - and become emotionally engaged with it through active participation.

Sources

Official Bulgaria Country Profile – PISA 2025, OECD
OECD – PISA 2025 Results: Bulgaria

Full PISA 2025 Report – OECD
OECD – PISA 2025 Results, Volume I