The challenges of widening participation in PISA
by Andreas Schleicher Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills Claudia Costin Senior Director, Education Global Practice, World Bank Since 2000, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been measuring the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in over 70 countries. PISA does not just examine whether students have learned what they were taught, but also assesses whether students can creatively and critically use what they know. Of course, such international comparisons are never easy and they aren’t perfect. But they show what is possible in education, they help governments to see themselves in comparison to the education opportunities and results delivered by other education systems, and they help governments to build effective policies and partnerships for improving learning outcomes. But as the number of countries joining PISA kept rising, it became apparent that the design and implementation models for PISA needed to evolve to successfully ...