The ability to sustain engagement and recover from setbacks (i.e., resilience)—is fundamental for learning. When resilience weakens, students are at risk of disengagement and may drop out and miss on opportunities. Therefore, predicting disengagement long before it happens during the window of hope is important. In this article, we test whether early warning signals of resilience loss, grounded in the concept of critical slowing down (CSD) can forecast disengagement before dropping out. CSD has been widely observed across ecological, climate, and neural systems, where it precedes tipping points into catastrophic failure (dropping out in our case). Using 1.67 million practice attempts from 9,401 students who used a digital math learning environment, we computed CSD indicators: autocorrelation, return rate, variance, skewness, kurtosis, and coefficient of variation. We found that 88.2% of students exhibited CSD signals prior to disengagement, with warnings clustering late in activity and before practice ceased (dropping out). Our results provide the first evidence of CSD in education, suggesting that universal resilience dynamics also govern social systems such as human learning. These findings offer a practical indicator for early detection of vulnerability and supporting learners across different applications and contexts long before critical events happen. Most importantly, CSD indicators arise universally, independent of the mechanisms that generate the data, offering new opportunities for portability across contexts, data types, and learning environments.

In increasing numbers of classrooms worldwide, students use digital learning software. However, we know little about the trajectories of usage and the performance within such digital learning software over the academic year. This study analyzed real-world longitudinal data from a mathematics learning software used in classrooms in Germany and the Netherlands (6,000 students who worked on >23 million problems). We evaluated students' usage and performance trajectories across an academic year by examining the percentage of students using the software, worked-through problems, active days and weeks, as well as performance. Our results indicate a decline in both usage and performance over the course of the academic year, with overall lower usage in Germany than in the Netherlands. Our findings highlight the need for further research into the factors maintaining or increasing the usage of and performance in classroom-integrated digital learning software over extended periods.