What does PISA actually assess? This book presents all the publicly available questions from the PISA surveys. Some of these questions were used in the PISA 2000, 2003 and 2006 surveys and others were used in developing and trying out the assessment.

After a brief introduction to the PISA assessment, the book presents three chapters, including PISA questions for the reading, mathematics and science tests, respectively. Each chapter presents an overview of what exactly the questions assess. The second section of each chapter presents questions which were used in the PISA 2000, 2003 and 2006 surveys, that is, the actual PISA tests for which results were published. The third section presents questions used in trying out the assessment. Although these questions were not used in the PISA 2000, 2003 and 2006 surveys, they are nevertheless illustrative of the kind of question PISA uses. The final section shows all the answers, along with brief comments on each question.