Frequently Asked Questions
What is PISA's purpose and how does PISA compare to other assessments?
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) fulfills a unique role in
providing a foundation of knowledge about learning in a real-world context. The United States, through the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), has been actively involved in the development of PISA since its inception, believing that PISA has a unique contribution to make in assessing student performance. PISA is intended to complement the portrait of U.S. performance obtained from other studies and to provide a new perspective on U.S. education in an international context. It is designed primarily to enable countries to benchmark their 15-year-old students' performance on a regular cycle in reading, mathematics, and science literacy with real-world tasks and complex problems. PISA is conducted every three years, with a primary focus on one area each cycle. PISA 2000 focused on reading literacy; mathematics literacy was the focus in 2003, and science literacy was the focus in 2006. PISA 2009 will rotate back to focusing on reading literacy.
The Purpose of PISA
The purpose of PISA is to represent the outcomes of learning for 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science literacy. The outcomes are represented by national averages of student scores. PISA assesses the cumulative educational experiences of all students who are 15 years of age at the time of assessment, irrespective of the grade levels or type of institutions in which they are enrolled. PISA assumes that by the age of 15, young people have had a series of learning experiences, both in and out of school, that allow them to perform at particular levels in reading, mathematics, and science literacy. Clearly, formal education will have played a major role in their performance, but other factors, such as learning opportunities at home or elsewhere outside of school, also play a role. Moreover, PISA aims to show how prepared 15-year-olds are for their futures based on what they have learned up to that point. The results from PISA provide a valuable indicator of the overall performance of a country's education system, but they also provide information about other factors that can influence performance.
The Unique Contribution of PISA
A number of international comparative studies already exist to measure achievement in mathematics, science, and reading, including the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). The International Survey of Adults (ISA) will measure the reading literacy skills of adults. In addition, the United States has been conducting its own national surveys of student achievement for more than 30 years through the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program. PISA differs from these studies in several ways:
- Content. PISA is designed to measure "literacy" broadly while other studies, such as TIMSS and NAEP, have a stronger link to curriculum frameworks and seek to measure students' mastery of specific knowledge, skills, and concepts. The content of PISA is drawn from broad content areas, such as space and shape for mathematics, in contrast to more specific curriculum-based content such as geometry or algebra.
- Tasks. In addition to the differences in purpose and age coverage between PISA and other international comparative studies, PISA differs from other assessments in what students are asked to do. PISA focuses on assessing students' knowledge and skills in reading, mathematics, and science literacy in the context of everyday situations. That is, PISA emphasizes the application of knowledge to everyday situations by asking students to perform tasks that involve interpretation of real-world materials as much as possible. A comparison report—A Comparison of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Third International Mathematics and Science Study Repeat (TIMSS-R), and the Programme for International Student Assessment—based on expert panels' reviews of mathematics and science items from PISA, TIMSS, and NAEP reports that PISA items require multi-step reasoning more often than either TIMSS or NAEP. The study also shows that PISA mathematics and science literacy items often involve the interpretation of charts and graphs or other "real world" material. These tasks reflect the underlying assumption of PISA: as 15-year-olds begin to make the transition to adult life, they need to know not only how to read, or particular mathematical formulas or scientific concepts, but also how to apply this knowledge and these skills in the many different situations they will encounter in their lives.
- Age-Based Sample. The goal of PISA is to represent outcomes of learning rather than outcomes of schooling. By placing the emphasis on age, PISA intends to show not only what 15-year-olds have learned in school, but outside of school as well as over the years, not just in a particular grade. PISA thus seeks to show the overall yield of an educational system and the cumulative effects of all learning experience. Focusing on age 15 provides an opportunity to measure broad learning outcomes while all students are still required to be in school across the many participating nations. Finally, because years of education vary among countries, choosing an age-based sample makes comparisons across countries somewhat easier.
- Information Collected. The kind of information PISA collects also reflects a policy purpose slightly different from the other assessments. PISA collects only background information related to general school context and student demographics. This differs from other international studies such as TIMSS, which collects background information related to how teachers in different countries approach the task of teaching and how the approved curriculum is implemented in the classroom. The TIMSS video studies further extend this work by actually capturing images of instruction across countries. The results of PISA will certainly inform education policy and spur further investigation into differences within and between countries, but PISA is not intended to provide direct information about improving instructional practice in the classroom. The purpose of PISA is to generate useful indicators to benchmark performance and inform policy.
For More Information visit:
- The National Center for Education Statistics website for information about NCES.
- The International Comparisons in Education website for information about NCES international assessments and projects.
- The OECD's PISA website for information about PISA from an international perspective.
- To learn about the differences in the respective approaches to the assessment of mathematics and science between PISA, TIMSS, and NAEP, see A Comparison of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Third International Mathematics and Science Study Repeat (TIMSS-R), and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), by David Nohara, and Comparing PIRLS and PISA with NAEP in Reading, Mathematics, and Science
(211 KB), by Maria Stephens and Mary McLaughlin Coleman.
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