The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), now in its seventh cycle, seeks to determine what is important for citizens to know and be able to do. PISA assesses the extent to which 15‑year‑old students near the end of their compulsory education have acquired the knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in modern societies.
The triennial assessment focuses on the core school subjects of reading, mathematics and science. Students’ proficiency in an innovative domain is also assessed; in 2018, this domain was global competence. The assessment does not just ascertain whether students can reproduce knowledge; it also examines how well students can extrapolate from what they have learned and can apply that knowledge in unfamiliar settings, both in and outside of school. This approach reflects the fact that modern economies reward individuals not for what they know, but for what they can do with what they know.
PISA is an ongoing programme that monitors trends in the knowledge and skills that students around the world, and in demographic subgroups within each country, have acquired. In each round of PISA, one of the core domains is tested in detail, taking up roughly one‑half of the total testing time. The major domain in 2018 was reading, as it was in 2000 and 2009. Mathematics was the major domain in 2003 and 2012, and science was the major domain in 2006 and 2015.
Through questionnaires distributed to students and school principals, and optional questionnaires distributed to parents and teachers, PISA also gathers information about students’ home background, their approaches to learning and their learning environments.
With this alternating schedule of major domains, a thorough analysis of achievement in each of the three core areas is presented every nine years; an analysis of trends is offered every three years. Combined with the information gathered through the various questionnaires, the PISA assessment provides three main types of outcomes:
Basic indicators that provide a profile of the knowledge and skills of students
Indicators derived from the questionnaires that show how such skills relate to various demographic, social, economic and educational variables
Indicators on trends that show changes in outcomes and their distributions, and in relationships between student-, school- and system-level background variables and outcomes.
Policy makers around the world use PISA findings to gauge the knowledge and skills of the students in their own country/economy compared with those in other participating countries/economies, establish benchmarks for improvements in the education provided and/or in learning outcomes, and understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of their own education systems.
This publication presents the theory underlying the PISA 2018 assessment – the seventh since the programme’s inception. It includes frameworks for assessing the three core subjects of reading, mathematics and science (Chapters 2, 3 and 4, respectively), the framework for the third assessment of students’ financial literacy (Chapter 5), and the framework for assessing the innovative domain, global competence (Chapter 6). These chapters outline the knowledge content that students need to acquire in each domain, the processes that students need to be able to perform, and the contexts in which this knowledge and these skills are applied. They also discuss how each domain is assessed. The publication concludes with the frameworks for the various questionnaires distributed to students, school principals, parents and teachers (Chapter 7), and the framework for the new well-being questionnaire distributed to students (Chapter 8).