The PISA for Schools project contributes to improving student learning opportunities and well-being by empowering teachers and school leaders through global connections and international benchmarking based on a common scale provided by PISA. The PISA-based Test for Schools (PBTS) is a digital assessment intended to help school leaders understand their 15-year-old students' abilities to think critically and apply their knowledge creatively in novel contexts.
PISA for Schools
The PISA-based Test for Schools provides school-level estimates of performance and information about the learning environment and students’ attitudes gathered from student questionnaires. Find out more and how schools and their networks can take part.
About
Vision and mission
Objective
The PISA for Schools project contributes to improving student learning and well-being by empowering teachers and school leaders through global connections and international benchmarking based on items that measure the same competences as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA is the world’s largest comparative education survey, present on its 2025 edition in more than 90 countries and economies worldwide.
The PISA for Schools project has three objectives:
- Measure students’ learning outcomes in mathematics, science and reading, as well as their social and emotional skills school environment, attitudes toward learning and student well-being. In particular, how well they can extrapolate that knowledge and skills and apply them in novel contexts.
- Explore: Empower schools, leaders at the system and national level, and other interested stakeholders by providing them with internationally comparable insights on students’ performance, learning environment, socioeconomic background, socio emotional skills and motivation for learning.
- Act: Provide peer-learning opportunities among teachers, school leaders guided by assessment experts as they apply their insights from targeted data in their efforts to improve student learning and well-being.
The PISA for Schools project seeks to empower schools and school systems by enabling them to:
Current Availability
PISA for Schools have benefitted students from:
- Australia
- Andorra
- Azerbaijan
- Brazil
- Brunei Darussalam
- Colombia
- European School Network
- India
- Japan (Saitama Prefecture)
- Kazakhstan
- Mexico
- People's Republic of China
- Portugal
- Russian Federation
- Spain
- Thailand
- United Arab Emirates
- United Kingdom
- United States
The test is available in the following languages:
- Arabic
- Azerbaijani
- Basque
- Catalan
- English
- French
- Galician
- German
- Japanese
- Kazakh
- Mandarin
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Spanish
- Thai
- Welsh
How PISA for Schools improves schools and systems worldwide
In order to achieve its mission of improving learning outcomes, all the while supporting schools and systems engaged in international benchmarking, the PISA for Schools project is implemented through three main strategies:
- the implementation of the PISA-Based Test for Schools (PBTS), an internationally comparable competence-based assessment based on the PISA assessment framework.
- the provision of Post-assessment and capacity-building workshops to make PBTS findings actionable at schools and systems.
- the support of innovation in PISA through directed research and piloting innovative assessment areas.
Each strategy is further explained in more detail below:
The PISA-based Test for Schools is a voluntary assessment that supports school improvement efforts and benchmarking based on the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Like PISA, the PISA-based Test for Schools measures 15-year-old students’ abilities to think critically, solve problems and communicate effectively in the content areas of reading, mathematics, and science with internationally and longitudinally comparable results that can be used to compare, understand, and monitor learning and student wellbeing in a school or system.
The PBTS measures not only whether students can reproduce what they have learned in the classroom, but how well they can extrapolate from what they know and employ their knowledge creatively in novel contexts. The student questionnaire also collects information on students’ attitudes towards learning and their school’s learning environment, as well as their socio-economic background and their social and emotional skills. Each school receives a personalized report that provides a solid evidence base for schools seeking to improve teaching and learning for all students, and a dataset so bespoke analysis of student responses can be performed in-house as desired. Similarly, systems wishing to benchmark students using the PBTS also receive a system-wide report containing indicators of particular relevance for its policymakers and an accompanying dataset for further analysis.
To ensure alignment with PISA, the assessment is available as a Computer-Based Assessment (CBA), in multiple languages and is delivered in a testing platform provided by the International Platform Provider (IPP), a partner accredited and working closely to the OECD and participating countries and economies, so the PBTS CBA implementation fits each and every participant worldwide.
As the framework, findings, and instruments from PISA supports the PISA-based Test for Schools and the results PISA for Schools brings to systems worldwide, the PISA for Schools in turn supports the development and innovation of the PISA study itself by acting, in partnership with interested schools and researchers, as a platform for pilot studies and novel implementations that may, in time, enrich the implementation of PISA at the international level.
Namely, the project offers interested schools and researchers an opportunity to pilot new and innovative assessment areas within participating schools on a voluntary basis. This development is not top-down, dictated by the OECD, but inspired by school needs: for instance, the project is currently working on introducing on-demand assessments to address schools' pressing requirements for diagnostic and formative assessments.
This experimental initiative harnesses the potential of powerful algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to perform automated scoring for prompt diagnostic feedback for teachers. This novel assessment boasts a modular structure, enabling participating schools to tailor selections of items and questionnaires to enhance student engagement and focusing of particular areas of interest for teachers and school leadership. This flexibility also permits participants to customise assessments to suit their specific needs, potentially making them shorter as necessary to include all students, including those who need shorter testing times and assistance.
In addition, innovative and additional domains from previous PISA cycles such as Creative Thinking (from PISA 2022), problem solving (from PISA 2003) , and Financial Literacy (from PISA 2015 onwards) could be offered and administered in PISA for Schools project for interested schools and systems Such was the case in 2022, when the PISA Global Crises Module was incorporated into the PISA for Schools as schools reopened after the global pandemic so teachers and school leadership could better understand how students fared away from in-person learning. In 2023, this particularly time-sensitive module was retired and replaced by a set of PISA 2018 Global Competence items, so schools can understand how their students see an increasingly connected world in which they will participate as global citizens.
For schools participating in PISA for Schools, it is often the case that the work is not over once students finish taking the PBTS – it is only the beginning. In order for all the information contained on its school report and dataset to make a difference, teachers, support staff and school leadership must often understand how to act on PBTS findings. As the PBTS measured, and the school reported on what students know and can do, post-assessment capacity-building workshops with experts mediated by the OECD empower schools and system to act on their PBTS results. These workshops, which are planned and tailored to fit each participating country and network, are intended to build staff capacity to understand, analyse and construct assessments that can enable schools and school systems to plan improvement initiatives and to measure the impact of interventions.
These also provides each country or economy's findings and feel more empowered and capable to understand and interpret assessment results, as well as increased overall data literacy. This overall improvement comes from the built-to-suit nature of these workshops, which are tailored to better support its audience. Some recent examples of workshops delivered by the PFS team include:
- Workshops for school-based educators to build assessment and data literacy.
- Workshops on Test Development to build capacity of school-system staff to develop and implement standardised assessments, and
- Workshops for data specialists for educators who are already comfortable with statistics and data, who wish to develop further their capacity to analyse test response data, using item-response theory and/or perform secondary-analysis on data from international large-scale assessments like PISA and the PBTS.
These interventions can be delivered both in person or through webinars and can last from 60 to 120 minutes for shorter “how to read your school report” sessions to full- or multiple-days on more involved topics and broader objectives. As of 2024, educators from Australia, Brazil, India, Portugal, and from several countries that are part of the European School Network have benefitted from PFS capacity building workshops.
In addition, the PFS team is working on the proposal of an Integrated test development and management project, a much larger collaboration with interested education systems, where much of the content of the three other streams is tailored and delivered to a group of system-level staff who are working to develop a new assessment, over at a minimum, of 2-years, but potentially longer, periods. In this endeavor, the PBTS is proposed as a monitoring instrument providing key indicators for education policy, and targeted interventions and analyses are planned to better act on PBTS findings. Interested education systems are invited to reach out to the PFS team at the OECD for more detail.
PISA for Schools Outcomes
School report
- Each participating school receives a comprehensive and unique report aimed at school improvement efforts and international benchmarking.
- You can find sample reports in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese (for now) and its Readers Guide companion at the PISA for Schools website.
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PISA for Schools Report TemplateLearn more
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PISA for Schools BrochureLearn more
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PISA for Schools InfographicLearn more
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PISA for Schools - Reader's guideLearn more
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PISA for Schools - Rapport Votre écoleLearn more
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PISA for Schools - National Service Provider HandbookLearn more
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PISA for Schools - Guía del lectorLearn more
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PISA for Schools - Guia do Leitor do Relatório da EscolaLearn more
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PISA for Schools - Ihre Schule ReportLearn more
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PISA for Schools - General Guidelines for use and availability (Nov 2019)Learn more
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PISA for Schools Technical Report 2022Learn more
Data
The data provided in each school report provides a solid evidence base for schools seeking to improve teaching and learning for all students and is provided along with the report itself. This data, stored in anonymized form in which no particular school or participating system can be discerned is also used by the OECD for research and development purposes to improve the assessment for all participating schools and systems. Researchers, assessment experts at governments and agencies, as well as schools themselves can use the data for secondary analysis.
PISA for Schools is very different from PISA with respect to how its findings are disseminated. Unlike PISA, which releases international findings one year after testing for every participant, data collected with the PBTS, and the school reports generated based on the assessment, are not published by the OECD, and only delivered to participants themselves. It is up to each participating school or school network to decide whether and to what extent they wish to publish the data. The PISA for Schools is designed to provide low-stakes comparative data at the school and sub-national levels and does not report on individual student performance.
Capacity building
Building capacity for educational improvement is one of the main aims of the PISA for Schools project. Capacity building activities can be broadly addressed either to participants (e.g. school staff) or to other stakeholders (e.g. Service Provider staff, analysts from educational authorities and other interested parties). For both groups, the OECD will provide international networking opportunities for peer-to-peer learning.
Online and in-person events are organised regularly to offer a space for school leaders, teachers, and educators to share and solve problems, learn from other contexts and experiences, and support others to understand the results from their School Report and implement change in their classrooms.
At the same time, Service Provider’s staff will acquire hands-on experience in competence-based educational assessment, from implementation to post-assessment activities. Staff will apply the principles of survey management, digital test administration, validation studies, data analysis and processing, and item analysis and development, drawing from the expertise and experience of the OECD and other partners of the PISA for Schools project.
Research papers
PISA-based Test for Schools data has already been used to improve PISA and PISA for Schools. Here is a sample of the research led by the OECD team, frequently in collaboration with partners and researchers worldwide:
Joining the PISA for Schools
Service Provider (SP) roles and expectations
The Service Provider will be the main technical counterpart of the OECD team vis-à-vis the implementation of PISA for Schools in any schools or school system in the country. This local partner will be responsible for contacting schools, managing the deployment of the PBTS testing platform in the schools’ language of instruction and manage PBTS administration logistics, such as the recruitment of test administrators and graders for open-ended PBTS items. The SP is thus expected to play a very important role as school or system participates in the PISA for Schools, and therefore its team will be expected to:
- Be in contact with the OECD and the IPP regarding all aspects of the PISA for Schools operational procedures.
- Discuss with the OECD national-specific aspects of the implementation of the PISA for Schools (e.g., national options for sampling, analyses, and reporting).
- Schools’ recruitment.
- Establish procedures for the protection of the confidentiality of materials during all phases of the implementation.
- Translation and adaption of PBTS test materials.
- Identify School Coordinators and work with them on school preparation activities.
- Select the student sample from a list of eligible students provided by the School Coordinators.
- Recruit and train tests administrators and coders for open ended questions.
- Perform checks of school equipment.
- Deliver the test Report on administration process.
- Coding of open-ended responses.
- Co-ordinate the reporting of individual school results and send school reports back to schools.
Timeline
The initial implementation of the PISA for Schools project takes approximately six months form the moment of signature of the agreement between the OECD and the participating schools or system before the test is available to be administrated to students. This first six months are used to properly prepare the PBTS for implementation and include, among other activities: translation and adaptation of the assessment, sampling of participating schools (when required), school recruitment and training of school administrators. Once the PBTS has been administrated, data is analysed by the PISA for Schools team and school reports delivered to all participating schools that reached data quality standards approximately four months after the date of the last test administration.
Therefore, in total it takes approximately 10 months to prepare the test, implement the test in the schools, analyse the data, and deliver school reports to participating schools. After the first testing cycle, the assessment can be provided on demand (and therefore with a shorter implementation window) to any school in country or territory.
Costs to implement PISA for Schools
The costs of implementing PISA-based Test for Schools two main components: international and national costs:
- International costs consist of a payment via a Voluntary Contribution (VC) to the OECD’s PISA Programme of Work and Budget. This VC is calculated to recover the costs of implementing the project at the OECD and the provision of the PBTS testing platform.
- National costs consist of local costs associated with delivery of the PISA for Schools, including technical support, logistics for test administration, marking of open-ended questions, among other tasks performed by the SP. Schools and systems usually implement the PBTS through a bilateral contract between schools or systems and the SP.
Quotes for international costs will be provided once the scope of the project is outlined between the OECD and interested schools and systems.
Contacts
F.A.Q.
The PISA for Schools project contributes to improving student learning opportunities and well-being by empowering teachers and school leaders through global connections and international benchmarking based on a common scale provided by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
The PISA-based Test for Schools (PBTS) is an assessment intended to help teachers, school and system leadership from across the world understand their 15-year-old students' abilities to think critically and apply their knowledge creatively in novel contexts.
PISA is an international study that was launched by the OECD in 1997, first administered in 2000 and now covers over 80 countries. Every 4 years the PISA survey provides comparative data on 15-year-olds’ performance in reading, mathematics, and science. In addition, each cycle explores a distinct “innovative domain” such as Creative Thinking (PISA 2022) and Learning in the Digital World (PISA 2025) , and an “optional domain” such as Financial Literacy (2015 to 2022, 2029) or Foreign Languages (English in PISA 2025). The results have informed education policy discussions at the national and global level since its inception.
Given our global, knowledge-based economy, it has become more important than ever before to compare students not only to local or national standards, but also to the performance of the world’s top-performing school systems. There has been growing interest in comparing student performance to international benchmarks, both as a gauge of how prepared students are to participate in a globalised society and as a means of setting targets above and beyond basic proficiency levels or local expectations.
- The main PISA study always takes priority in countries that participate in PISA and in which the PISA-based Test for Schools is made available. The OECD will work with the PISA national centre to limit interference with school recruitment, and minimize overlap between schools taking the PBTS and those sampled for the field trial or main data collection of PISA (and/or other international or local assessments, as needed within the context where the PFS-participating schools are inserted), for example by defining specific periods during which the PBTS should not be administered.
- The PBTS is not and cannot be used as an alternative to the main PISA study. The PBTS is designed to deliver school-level results which can, under certain conditions, be aggregated to provide group-level results (e.g., for school networks, municipalities, or other sub-national jurisdictions). However, for those countries in which sub-national jurisdictions already participate in PISA and receive jurisdiction-level results through extended oversampling, the PBTS should not be used as an alternative. Furthermore, as it is built to fit schools and smaller systems, PBTS assessment design aims to focus on a narrower range of assessment constructs than a given PISA cycle, this acting as a complement to PISA and never as a replacement.
The OECD accredits a Service Provider (SPs) for the administration of PISA-based Test for Schools in each country who adhere to the provisions set out in the Accreditation Agreement, the OECD Technical Report and the PISA for Schools General Guidelines.
The OECD provides training to SPs prior to the administration of the PBTS, carries out quality control checks on the data collected and conducts data analysis for each school. The OECD reserves the right to withhold its approval of any school report and the use of the OECD logo if data quality standards are not met.
Schools participating in the PISA for Schools project receive a comprehensive report in electronic format detailing their school’s performance measured against national PISA results from their own country and the average of the OECD Member countries. Other meaningful benchmarks (e.g. the EU-27 average of European Union countries, or the DACH average of German-speaking countries) can also be added upon discussion.
Schools are encouraged to share and discuss their results with teachers, staff, students and parents to foster deeper understanding of the overall performance of their school as a basis for future action.
The PISA-based Test for Schools is a school-level assessment. Aggregate results for school networks may only be reported in addition to individual school-level reporting. This helps ensure that the assessment supports school-improvement discussions at the school level, with the school at the centre of the process. School networks may request to include specific sub-populations or socio-economic groups for which they wish to collect specific information. Such requests will be discussed with the accredited National Service Provider(s) in each country and agreed with the OECD on a case-by-case basis.
The results of the assessment, for individual schools or school networks, should not be used for marketing or commercial purposes by the schools themselves, by third parties or by contractors.
To be eligible to receive a school report, schools have to have tested a minimum number of 42 eligible students (i.e., those who are aged between 15 years and 3 completed months to 16 years and 2 completed months at the time of testing). To ensure that the minimum number of 42 students per school is reached, it is recommended to test at least 55 students, assuming a participation rate of 80%.
For prospective participants are two main components in the overall cost of participation, as follows:
- the international participation costs, paid to the OECD that assure cost-recovery for the PFS team and fund the provision of the PBTS testing platform, and
- the local costs associated with administering the PBTS (e.g., promotion, sign up, test delivery, coding open-ended responses) which will vary in each country and are incurred by the SP.
For individual schools or school networks, the costs for participation can be established by the accredited SP. In those jurisdictions in which the SP is a government agency, participation is very often free for schools.
For more details regarding costs, please contact the OECD PISA for Schools team at pisaforschools@oecd.org.
The PISA for Schools project helps schools measure, explore and act:
- Measure students’ learning outcomes in mathematics, science and reading, as well as their social and emotional skills and well-being. How well they can extrapolate that knowledge and skills and apply them in novel contexts.
- Explore: Empower school leaders and teachers by providing them with data about their students’ performance, learning environment, socioeconomic background, and motivation for learning.
- Act: Provide global peer-learning opportunities among teachers and school leaders as they apply their insights from targeted data in their efforts to improve student learning and well-being in their school.
While PISA is intended to deliver national level results, the PISA-based Test for Schools is designed to deliver school-level results for school improvement and benchmarking purposes. Because both assessments are based on the same framework, the results are comparable, meaning that individual schools benchmark their performance with that of national education systems from around the world. Like PISA, PBTS assesses the extent to which 15-year-old students near the end of compulsory education have acquired the knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in modern societies.
School leaders and teachers have reported using results to:
- Benchmark their performance in a global setting. Schools are using the results to set goals against the best school systems worldwide and to create a greater sense of urgency to push for higher levels of achievement.
- Better understand the challenges faced by low-performing students.
- Create peer-learning communities and networks with other schools and teachers.
Since 2019, the PISA-based Test for Schools is provided as a digital assessment through an International Platform Provider (IPP). The OECD accredits a Service Provider (SP) for the implementation of the assessment. Under rigorous technical oversight from the OECD, the accredited SP administers the assessment to schools using the digital platform run by the IPP.
The project's IPP is a software company that specialises in large scale implementations for global, national, and regional implementations of digital testing. It is responsible for developing digital solutions for the delivery of the assessment as well as the analysis and reporting of results to schools and works in close collaboration with the OECD and the SPs in each country.
Students respond to approximately two hours of test questions in reading, mathematics and science and answer a 30-minute student questionnaire. The testing experience for a student lasts approximately three to three-and-a-half hours, including instructions and break periods.
Once the validation study in a given country is complete, the SP can schedule delivery of the PBTS during a defined ‘test window’ of its choice, in agreement with the OECD.
Notwithstanding the above, the PBTS cannot be offered during the period in which the main PISA study conducts its main data collection, which happens every 4 years in each participating country.
The PISA-based Test for Schools and its results are designed to provide schools with a diagnostic tool to foster reflection, peer-learning and action. They are not meant to be interpreted or used as school rankings or for “league tables”. Furthermore, the PBTS does not provide student-level performance reporting and cannot be used to rank student performance.
