Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)'s international comparative survey of 15-year-old students, assessing the extent to which they have acquired key knowledge and skills essential for full participation in social and economic life. The survey’s core domains are mathematics, reading, and science, and the focal core domain rotates with each PISA cycle. Additionally, each cycle includes an innovative domain.

Developed jointly by OECD member countries through the OECD’s Directorate for Education, PISA looks at how far students approaching the end of compulsory education have succeeded in acquiring some of the knowledge and skills essential that enable individuals' full participation in the knowledge society of today. PISA is an important part of the work of the Directorate for Education of the OECD, which collects data and provides comparative indicators of education systems in OECD member and partner countries.

This programme aims to provide comparable data with a view to enabling countries to improve their education policies and outcomes, while measuring at the same time problem solving and cognition. PISA was conceived to set the information provided by national monitoring of education system performance in a wider context - through regular assessments within a common, internationally agreed framework. In fact, by investigating relationships between student learning and other factors, the metric can offer insights into sources of variation in performances within and between countries.

PISA is sponsored, governed, and coordinated by the OECD and financed by participating countries.

PISA 2025 and PISA 2029

More than 90 countries and economies are participating in PISA 2025. The focal domain is science, with mathematics and reading as minor domains. It also includes, for the first time, a Foreign Language Assessment (FLA) and the innovative domain is Learning in the Digital World (LDW), which measures students’ capacity to engage in an iterative process of knowledge building and problem solving using computational tools. 

The initial results will be released in September 2026.

PISA 2029 will soon be initiated. It will focus on reading, with science and mathematics as minor domains, and Media and AI Literacy (MAIL) as the innovative domain.