Lessons Learned from PISA: A Systematic Review of Peer-Reviewed Articles on the Programme for International Student Assessment

ABSTRACT

International large-scale assessments are on the rise, with the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) seen by many as having strategic prominence in education policy debates. The present article reviews PISA-related English-language peer-reviewed articles from the programme’s first cycle in 2000 to its most current in 2015. Five literature bases were searched, and results were analysed with SPSS. Results map the frequency of publications according to journal, country, and scientific discipline. They also summarise major themes within three identified categories: secondary analysis, policy impact, and critiques. Findings indicated that studies based on the PISA dataset has led to progress in educational research while simultaneously pointing to the need for caution when using this research to inform educational policy.

KEYWORDS:

• PISA
• policy impact
• secondary analysis
• critiques

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/pisafaq.htm

2 ZIB is a network of the Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung, Leibniz-Institut für die Pädagogik der Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik and the School of Education der Technischen Universität München.

3 An initial search in the German education focused, literature catalogue (FIS Bildung) identified almost 1,200 German-language articles between 1999 and 2015, when the search was conducted with PISA entered in the keyword section. This indicates, not only for Germany, the extent to which PISA-related research is discussed within national-linguistic contexts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Kunnskapssenter for utdanning, Norway.