Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)

2. USES OF DATA

PISA provides valuable information for comparisons of student performance across jurisdictions and over time at the national level and for some jurisdictions at the subnational level. This section uses 'jurisdictions' and 'education systems' interchangeably. Performance in each subject area can be compared across jurisdictions in terms of:

• education systems' mean scores;
• the proportion of students in each education system reaching PISA proficiency levels;
• the scores of education systems' highest performing and lowest performing students;
• the standard deviation of scores in each education system; and
• other measures of the distribution of performance within education systems.

PISA also supports cross-jurisdictional comparisons of the performance of some subgroups of students, including students grouped by sex, immigrant status, and socioeconomic status. PISA data are not useful for comparing the performance of racial/ethnic groups across jurisdictions because relevant racial/ethnic groups differ across jurisdictions. However, PISA datasets for the United States include information that can be used in comparing groups of students by race/ethnicity and school poverty level.

Contextual measures taken from student and principal questionnaires can be used to compare the educational contexts of 15-year-old students across jurisdictions. Caution should be taken, however, in attempting to interpret associations between measures of educational context and student performance. The PISA assessment is intended to tap factual knowledge and problem-solving skills that students learn over several years, whereas PISA contextual measures typically reference students' current school context. In the United States, for example, data collection occurs in the fall of the school year; therefore, contextual measures may apply to schools that children have attended for only 1 or 2 months.

Through the collection of comparable information across jurisdictions at the student and school levels, PISA adds significantly to the knowledge base that was previously available only from official national statistics.