Cognitive resilience and sustained engagement: Response time dynamics in PISA 2022 mathematics

To investigate whether cognitive resilience is associated with a buffering pattern against effort withdrawal as subjective task difficulty rises, using response time (RT) dynamics from PISA 2022 Mathematics process data.

Drawing on 51,190 item responses from the South Korean sample, cross-classified multilevel models with plausible-value pooling were fitted to examine the interaction between cognitive resilience (CR) and relative difficulty (RD) on log-transformed response time. Within-between decomposition of RD and multiple sensitivity analyses were conducted to disentangle within-person situational regulation from between-person differences and to assess robustness across data-cleaning specifications.

Higher relative difficulty was consistently associated with shorter time-on-task (β ≈ -0.19, p < .001), reflecting a general tendency toward effort withdrawal as task demands increase. Students with greater cognitive resilience showed a significantly smaller reduction in time-on-task (CR × RD: β ≈ 0.02, p < .001). This moderating effect operated primarily at the within-person level and remained significant when analyses were restricted to correct responses only, consistent with productive persistence rather than unproductive wheel-spinning.

Cognitive resilience is associated with a buffering pattern against effort withdrawal under challenging conditions in a large-scale mathematics assessment. The findings offer a process-oriented framework for understanding academic persistence beyond final scores and highlight the importance of fostering self-regulatory capacities in demanding learning environments. However, causal interpretations are precluded by the observational design, and the self-reported resilience measure captures perceived regulatory capacity rather than direct assessment of executive or metacognitive processes.