PISA is a collaborative effort, bringing together experts from the participating countries, steered jointly by their governments on the basis of shared, policy-driven interests.
A PISA Governing Board, on which each country is represented, determines the policy priorities for PISA, in the context of OECD objectives, and oversees adherence to these priorities during the implementation of the programme. This includes setting priorities for the development of indicators, for establishing the assessment instruments, and for reporting the results.
Experts from participating countries also serve on working groups that are charged with linking policy objectives with the best internationally available technical expertise. By participating in these expert groups, countries ensure that the instruments are internationally valid and take into account the cultural and educational contexts in OECD member and partner countries and economies, that the assessment materials have strong measurement properties, and that the instruments emphasise authenticity and educational validity.
Through National Project Managers, participating countries and economies implement PISA at the national level subject to the agreed administration procedures. National Project Managers play a vital role in ensuring that the implementation of the survey is of high quality, and verify and evaluate the survey results, analyses, reports and publications.
The design and implementation of the surveys, within the framework established by the PISA Governing Board, is the responsibility of external contractors. For PISA 2018, the overall management of contractors and implementation was carried out by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in the United States as the Core A contractor. Tasks under Core A also included instrument development, development of the computer platform, survey operations and meetings, scaling, analysis and data products. These tasks were implemented in co-operation with the following subcontractors; i) the University of Luxembourg for support with test development; ii) the Unité d’analyse des systèmes et des pratiques d’enseignement (aSPe) at the University of Liège in Belgium for test development and coding training for open-response items; iii) the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in the Netherlands for the data management software; iv) Westat in the United States for survey operations; v) Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung (DIPF) in Germany, with co-operation from Statistics Canada, for the development of the questionnaires; and vi) HallStat SPRL in Belgium for the translation referee.
The remaining tasks related to the implementation of PISA 2018 were implemented through three additional contractors – Cores B to D. The development of the cognitive assessment frameworks for reading and global competence and of the framework for questionnaires was carried out by Pearson in the United Kingdom as the Core B contractor. Core C focused on sampling and was the responsibility of Westat in the United States in co-operation with the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) for the sampling software KeyQuest. Linguistic quality control and the development of the French source version for Core D were undertaken by cApStAn, who worked in collaboration with BranTra as a subcontractor.
The OECD Secretariat has overall managerial responsibility for the programme, monitors its implementation daily, acts as the secretariat for the PISA Governing Board, builds consensus among countries and serves as the interlocutor between the PISA Governing Board and the international Consortium charged with implementing the activities. The OECD Secretariat also produces the indicators and analyses and prepares the international reports and publications in co-operation with the PISA Consortium and in close consultation with member and partner countries and economies both at the policy level (PISA Governing Board) and at the level of implementation (National Project Managers).