School-level peer digital distraction, mathematics performance, creative thinking, and adolescent well-being across 80 education systems: global evidence from PISA 2022

Background: Digital-device debates in schools often focus on students' own use or nominal phone bans. We examined whether school-level peer digital distraction, conceptualised as a shared classroom exposure, was associated with mathematics performance, creative thinking, and life satisfaction across PISA 2022 systems. Methods: In this cross-sectional observational study, we used public PISA 2022 student, school, and creative-thinking data. The analytic file included 613,744 students from 21,629 schools in 80 countries/economies, representing approximately 28.3 million 15-year-old students. Full adjusted complete-case samples included 77,216 students for mathematics, 65,222 for creative thinking, and 67,748 for life satisfaction. The exposure was a weighted leave-one-out school-level peer digital-distraction measure. Models used country/economy fixed effects, PISA final student weights, 80 Fay balanced repeated replication weights, and plausible-value pooling. Results: We found that higher school-level peer digital distraction was associated with lower mathematics performance (β = -34.28; standard error (SE) = 3.95; 95% confidence interval (CI) = -42.02, -26.54, P < 0.001) and lower creative-thinking performance (β = -3.81; SE = 0.53; 95% CI = -4.85, -2.76, P < 0.001). Per within-country standard deviation of the exposure, the adjusted associations were -11.31 points for mathematics and -1.19 points for creative thinking. Phone-ban interactions were not statistically significant. School-level peer digital distraction was not significantly associated with life satisfaction. Conclusions: Across a large global PISA 2022 file, school-level peer digital distraction was consistently associated with lower mathematics and creative-thinking performance in complete-case adjusted models. Findings are cross-sectional associations and should not be interpreted as causal evidence of educational harm or policy effectiveness.