In its Call for Tender for PISA 2009, the PISA Governing Board (PGB) established the main policy issues it sought to address in the fourth cycle of PISA. In particular, the PGB required PISA 2009 to collect a set of basic demographic data as a core component that replicated key questions from the previous cycles. In addition, PISA 2009 needed to address issues related to important aspects of the affective domain, information about students’ experience with reading in and out of school (e.g. experience of different approaches to the teaching of reading, preferred ways of learning), motivation, interest in reading and engagement in reading. At the school level, PISA 2009 needed to explore curriculum, teaching and learning in the area of reading, including aspects of the teachers’ careers and qualifications concerning the test language. Since the impact of out-of-school factors was considered of particular interest in a PISA survey where reading literacy was the major domain, the PGB recommended the inclusion of a parent questionnaire as an optional instrument.