Technical Report and User's Guide for the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA): Data Files and Databse with U.S. Specific Variables, 2009.

摘要

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international assessment of 15-year-old students. PISA measures how well students apply their knowledge and skills learned in and out of school in reading, mathematics, and science literacy to problems within a real-life context. PISA also gathers information from students and school principals about school context and from students about their educational experiences and attitudes. Analyses of PISA data have provided information about the relative performance of students across nations, as well as variation across nations in relationships between student background, attitudes, and experiences and their performance in mathematics, reading, and science literacy at age 15. PISA, which began in 2000, is conducted in 3-year cycles. Each PISA administration assesses one of the three subject areas in depth, although all three are assessed in each cycle. Assessing all three areas allows participating countries to have an ongoing source of achievement data in every subject area while rotating one area as the main focus over the years. In the fourth cycle of PISA, reading was the subject area assessed in depth, as it was in 2000. PISA 2009 included an in-depth assessment of reading, as well as shorter assessments of mathematics and science. The in-depth assessment of reading included a sufficient number of items to develop performance estimates for reading literacy overall as well as for subscales involving specific aspects or processes of reading: accessing or retrieving information, integrating and interpreting, and reflecting and evaluating. Subscale scores were not available for mathematics literacy or science literacy for 2009 (subscale scores are available for mathematics in the 2003 PISA data and for science in the 2006 data). In addition, PISA 2009 collected information on students backgrounds, attitudes towards reading, and learning strategies. School principals also were asked to provide information on school demographic characteristics and the learning environment in the school.