Since 2000 when the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched a global academic benchmark for measuring student outcomes by testing 15-year-olds, many global education systems have been impacted by what sometimes looks and feels like a race to rank high.
    When the OECD launched the Programme for International Student Assessment — PISA — the idea was to enable countries to make cross-national comparisons of student achievement using a common/standard metric to increase human capital. In other words, higher academic achievement should corelate with earnings in the future and a country’s standard of living. As PISA states, it publishes the results of the test a year after the students are tested to help governments shape their education policies.
    As PISA has developed, through seven global testing rounds every three years, with the first in 2000 and the most recent in 2018, for some it has gained a reputation as the “Olympics of education” given the widespread attention that country rankings receive following the release of results.
    Now, partly in the face of criticisms, PISA is looking at expanding how and what it tests. As this process unfolds, policy-makers must remember that the social consequences of a test are just as important as the test’s content. Putting a new face on PISA will undoubtedly present various opportunities and challenges.
    To date, PISA has been restricted to what is generally called the “cognitive” side of learning, focusing on reading, mathematics and scientific literacy. In addition to test questions, students and school principals fill out questionnaires to provide contextual information on student and school environment characteristics that can be associated with more or less favourable performance.
    Countries that excel in PISA tests, such as Finland, a country with less than six million people, have become regarded by policy-makers as a “global reference society” — an ideal to aspire to — due to their high performance in PISA rankings.
    Asian countries or jurisdictions like Singapore, Hong Kong (China) and Japan tend to consistently achieve exceptional PISA performances and hence get a lot of attention from other countries wishing to emulate their success via borrowing policy. For example, England flew teachers out to China to study mathematics teaching.
    In the next administration in 2021, PISA will tackle creative thinking, trying to find ways to assess, and have students assess, flexibility in thinking and habits of creativity such as being inquisitive and persistent. The PISA team is also developing a way of testing students’ digital learning, which should be ready in time for the 2024 assessment.
    However, it should be remembered that education policies from high achieving nations don’t migrate across international boundaries without consideration given to national and cultural contexts. Rather, innovations and changes in education require teachers to have the time and opportunity to re-educate themselves in relation to more recent insights in what it means to get the best out of children.

    The OECD will need to respond to previous critiques and provide greater transparency around newer test instruments and the choices made to arrive at rankings. The latter is no small challenge since the future focus of PISA is based on topics which seem more difficult to evaluate than math, science or reading skills.