Studying at the NYU Stern School of Business – Ethan Baron photo
Focus Could Be The New Most Valuable Skill In Education
Never before have students had so much information at their fingertips. Even so, it seems as though they’re finding it harder to sit with information long enough to truly understand it.
That is one of the most fascinating bits of information emerging from the PISA 2025 results, released by the OECD this week. Lucas Gortazar, Director of Research and Senior Fellow in Education at EsadeEcPol assessed the report’s numbers, which considered 760,000 students across 91 countries and economies, representing roughly 33 million 15-year-olds worldwide.
The assessment provides a massive snapshot of how teenagers are performing, but Gortazar’s analysis looks beyond the scores to consider what may be changing about the way they learn. “The report points to growing difficulties in sustaining attention and effort when dealing with longer and more demanding texts,” Gortazar writes.
One of his most unexpected findings is who is experiencing the sharpest decline. Turns out, the decline is most prominent among students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. This shakes the idea that academic setbacks are concentrated primarily among students with fewer resources.
ATTENTION IS THE NEW LEARNING CURVE
Looking deeper at the findings, it seems as though students are having a harder time sticking with difficult work that takes them longer. When faced with a long or demanding text, they are increasingly likely to give a quick and more likely incorrect answer, rather than slow down, work through the problem, or leave it unanswered. This is often in conjunction with generative AI, which adds so much to the mix.
More than 90% of 15-year-olds in Spain reported using chatbots for schoolwork. That said, students who didn’t use AI performed more than 20 points better on tasks involving text synthesis and production, even after accounting for socioeconomic background.
That’s not to say AI is causing students to underperform. Gortazar is careful not to make that claim. But he says this does bring up important questions about how these tools may be changing the way young people read, process, and produce information. AI can be fabulous for explaining a difficult concept, generating ideas, or helping someone understand a concept. However, if a student hands over the thinking every time a problem becomes difficult, they may also be skipping the mental workout that actually builds the skill.
That may sound like a small behavioral shift, but it has much bigger implications when you think about this translating to a student’s future. The ability to wrestle with something difficult without immediately giving up is exactly what students need in college, internships, and (eventually) the workplace. Workplace skills are highly critical especially with more and more students valuing career comes as one of their biggest reasons for pursuing higher ed in the first place.
FOCUS AS A CAREER SKILL
It’s not just the students who value this skill, but the employers too. This year, the Job Outlook 2026 report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers says that students who can demonstrate how they’ve applied their skills to real, sustained problem‑solving stand out most in the hiring process. “Providing evidence of their skills requires students to reflect on their experiences through the lens of the job search and make a connection between the skills they have gained and the job for which they are applying,” says Shawn VanDerziel, NACE’s president and CEO.
It just may be that in the near future, the ability to concentrate could become one of the most valuable skills a young professional can have.
“Taken together, the findings suggest that the challenge facing education systems goes beyond academic attainment,” says Gortazar. “It increasingly concerns students’ ability to sustain attention, engage with complex information and develop the capacity to learn effectively in a rapidly changing digital environment.”
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