Programme for International Student Assessment

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nations intended to evaluate educational systems by measuring 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading.

[4] PISA was conceived to set in a wider context the information provided by national monitoring of education system performance through regular assessments within a common, internationally agreed framework; by investigating relationships between student learning and other factors they can "offer insights into sources of variation in performances within and between countries".

[9] They allow typologies to be developed that can be used for comparative statistical analyses of education performance indicators, thereby identifying the consequences of different policy choices.

For example, in Germany, the results of the first PISA assessment caused the so-called 'PISA shock': a questioning of previously accepted educational policies; in a state marked by jealously guarded regional policy differences, it led ultimately to an agreement by all Länder to introduce common national standards and even an institutionalised structure to ensure that they were observed.

[13] In Hungary, by comparison, which shared similar conditions to Germany, PISA results have not led to significant changes in educational policy.

[10] Thus, it is argued that the use of international standardised assessments has led to a shift towards international, external accountability for national system performance; Rey contends that PISA surveys, portrayed as objective, third-party diagnoses of education systems, actually serve to promote specific orientations on educational issues.

[15] PISA data can be "used to fuel long-standing debates around pre-existing conflicts or rivalries between different policy options, such as in the French Community of Belgium".

Rey (2010:145, citing Greger, 2008) notes that often the real results of PISA assessments are ignored as policymakers selectively refer to data in order to legitimise policies introduced for other reasons.

Much of PISA's methodology follows the example of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS, started in 1995), which in turn was much influenced by the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

PISA aims to test literacy of students in three competence fields: reading, mathematics, science on an indefinite scale.

TIMSS, on the other hand, measures more traditional classroom content such as an understanding of fractions and decimals and the relationship between them (curriculum attainment).

In the reading test, "OECD/PISA does not measure the extent to which 15-year-old students are fluent readers or how competent they are at word recognition tasks or spelling."

Following the cognitive test, participating students spend nearly one more hour answering a questionnaire on their background including learning habits, motivation, and family.

Such meta-analysis is not endorsed by the OECD, although official summaries sometimes use scores from a testing cycle's principal domain as a proxy for overall student ability.

The results of PISA 2022 were presented on 5 December 2023, which included data for around 700,000 participating students in 81 countries and economies, with Singapore emerging as the top performer in all categories.

[30] Both Lebanon and the Chinese provinces/municipalities of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang participated this edition, but their results were not published as they were not able to fully collect data because of COVID restrictions.

"[44] Schleicher believes that China has also expanded school access and has moved away from learning by rote,[45] performing well in both rote-based and broader assessments.

[48] Following the 2015 testing, OECD published in depth studies on the education systems of a selected few countries including China.

[49] In 2014, Liz Truss, the British Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Education, led a fact-finding visit to schools and teacher-training centres in Shanghai.

Former minister of Education and Science Krista Kiuru expressed concern for the overall drop, as well as the fact that the number of low-performers had increased from 7% to 12%.

Accordingly, in February 2017, the Ministry of Human Resource Development under Prakash Javadekar decided to end the boycott and participate in PISA from 2020.

[63] Opposition politician Ong Kian Ming said the education ministry tried to oversample high-performing students in rich schools.

[69] Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard warned against putting too much emphasis on the UK's international ranking, arguing that an overfocus on scholarly performances in East Asia might have contributed to the area's low birthrate, which he argued could harm the economic performance in the future more than a good PISA score would outweigh.

by William Stewart, detailing serious critiques of PISA's conceptual foundations and methods advanced by statisticians at major universities.

[72] In the article, Professor Harvey Goldstein of the University of Bristol was quoted as saying that when the OECD tries to rule out questions suspected of bias, it can have the effect of "smoothing out" key differences between countries.

Morrison said that when he first published his criticisms of PISA in 2004 and also personally queried several of the OECD's "senior people" about them, his points were met with "absolute silence" and have yet to be addressed.

"[72] Professor Svend Kreiner, of the University of Copenhagen, agreed: "One of the problems that everybody has with PISA is that they don't want to discuss things with people criticising or asking questions concerning the results.

[75] Data from PISA have furnished several researchers, notably Eric Hanushek, Ludger Wößmann, Heiner Rindermann, and Stephen J. Ceci, with material for books and articles about the relationship between student achievement and economic development,[76] democratization, and health;[77] as well as the roles of such single educational factors as high-stakes exams,[78] the presence or absence of private schools and the effects and timing of ability tracking.

It's unwise for countries to base education policy on their Pisa results, as Germany, Norway and Denmark did after doing badly in 2001.

"[80] According to a Forbes opinion article, some countries such as China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Argentina select PISA samples from only the best-educated areas or from their top-performing students, slanting the results.