PISA is a collaborative effort, bringing together experts from the participating countries, steered jointly by their governments based on shared, policy-driven interests.
The PISA Governing Board, on which each country is represented, determines the policy priorities for PISA, in the context of OECD objectives, and oversees adherence to these priorities during the implementation of the programme. This includes setting priorities for the development of indicators, for establishing the assessment instruments, and for reporting the results.
Experts from various countries serve on working groups that are charged with linking policy objectives with the best internationally available technical expertise. By participating in these expert groups, they ensure that the instruments are internationally valid and take into account the cultural and educational contexts in OECD member and partner countries and economies, that the assessment materials have strong measurement properties, and that the instruments place emphasis on authenticity and educational validity.
Through National Project Managers, participating countries and economies implement PISA at the national level subject to the agreed administration procedures. National Project Managers play a vital role in ensuring that the implementation of the survey is of high quality, and verify and evaluate the survey results, analyses, reports and publications.
The design and implementation of the surveys, within the framework established by the PISA Governing Board, is the responsibility of external contractors. For PISA 2025, the overall management of contractors and implementation was carried out by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) in Australia as the Core 1 contractor. Tasks under Core 1 also included instrument development, survey operations and meetings, development of the computer platform, linguistic quality control, data handling, analysis and scaling. These tasks were implemented in co-operation from the following subcontractors: i) Open Assessment Technologies for the development and maintenance of the PISA 2025 platform and migration of trend units; ii) cApStAn SA for linguistic quality control; and iii) HallStat SPRL as translation referee.
The remaining tasks related to the implementation of PISA 2025 were implemented through three additional contractors – Cores 2 to 4. The development of the cognitive assessment framework for science was carried out by Oxford University Press (OUP) in the United Kingdom, as the Core 2 contractor. Sampling and weighting were under the responsibility of Westat in the United States as the Core 3 contractor, with ACER as a subcontractor for the sampling software Maple. The Instrument development for the Learning in the Digital World assessment was carried out by ACER, as the Core 4 contractor.
The OECD Secretariat has overall managerial responsibility for the programme, monitors its implementation daily, acts as the secretariat for the PISA Governing Board, builds consensus among countries and serves as the interlocutor between the PISA Governing Board and the international contractors charged with implementing the activities. The OECD Secretariat also produces the indicators and analyses and prepares the international reports and publications in co-operation with the PISA Core contractors and in close consultation with member and partner countries and economies both at the policy level (PISA Governing Board) and at the level of implementation (National Project Managers).
For PISA 2025, the OECD Secretariat also coordinated the development of the PISA 2025 Foreign Language Assessment (FLA), collaborated with the Core 1 Contractor in its implementation and led the development of the FLA framework and FLA questionnaires. The tests for the PISA 2025 Foreign Language assessment were developed in partnership with Cambridge University Press & Assessment, who provided the tests and conducted the scoring of speaking responses.
The cognitive assessment framework and initial prototype items for the PISA 2025 Learning in the Digital World assessment were developed by the OECD Secretariat in collaboration with the Learning in the Digital World Expert Group and extended expert groups. The OECD Secretariat also collaborated with ACER, the Core 4 Contractor, on the development of LDW instruments, scoring rules and indicators of self-regulated learning (SRL). The OECD Secretariat developed the SRL and LDW process data databases and related documentation.