TAKE THE TEST: SAMPLE QUESTIONS FROM OECD’S PISA ASSESSMENTS - ISBN 978-92-64-05080-8 -
Parents, students, teachers, school leaders, governments and the general public need good informationon how well their education systems prepare students for life. A growing commitment by governments tomonitor the outcomes of education systems in terms of student achievement on a regular basis and within aninternationally agreed framework led to the launch of the OECD’s Programme for International Assessment(PISA) in 1997. There have so far been three PISA surveys: in 2000, 2003 and 2006. The results from PISAprovide a new basis for policy dialogue and for collaboration in defining and implementing educationalgoals, in innovative ways that reflect judgements about the skills that are relevant to adult life.What does PISA actually assess? This report brings together all the publicly available questions in reading,mathematics and science and, together with the PISA assessment frameworks, gives a solid overview of thePISA test. Some of these questions were used in the PISA 2000, 2003 and 2006 surveys and others wereused in developing and trying out the assessment. For the questions used in the PISA 2000, 2003 and 2006surveys, country results are provided in Annex B to allow an overview of how well students did in eachcountry on different types of questions.Each chapter in this report has two distinct sections: the first presents the questions and the second presentsthe answers to these questions. This allows the reader to take the test!This report was compiled by Susanne Salz and Diana Toledo Figueroa, with editorial assistance fromElisabeth Villoutreix and Juliet Evans.