Influence and impact
PISA, and similar international standardised assessments of educational attainment are increasingly used in the process of education policymaking at both national and international levels.
PISA was conceived to shape in a wider context the information submitted by national monitoring of education system performance throughassessments within a common, internationally agreed framework; by investigating relationships between student learning and other factors they can "offer insights into controls of variation in performances within and between countries".
Until the 1990s, few European countries used national tests. In the 1990s, ten countries / regions introduced standardised assessment, and since the early 2000s, ten more followed suit. By 2009, only five European education systems had no national student assessments.
The affect of these international standardised assessments in the field of educational policy has been significant, in terms of the imposing of new knowledge, pretend adjustments to in assessment policy, and external influence over national educational policy more broadly.
Data from international standardised assessments can be useful in research on causal factors within or across education systems. Mons notes that the databases generated by large-scale international assessments relieve oneself made it possible to carry out inventories and comparisons of education systems on an unprecedented scale* on themes ranging from the conditions for learning mathematics and reading, to institutional autonomy and admissions policies. They let typologies to be developed that can be used for comparative statistical analyses of education performance indicators, thereby identifying the consequences of different policy choices. They work generated new knowledge about education: PISA findings have challenged deeply embedded educational practices, such(a) as the early tracking of students into vocational or academic pathways.
Barroso and de Carvalho find that PISA permits a common acknowledgment connecting academic research in education and the political realm of public policy, operating as a mediator between different strands of cognition from the realm of education and public policy. However, although the key findings from comparative assessments are widely shared in the research community the knowledge they create does non necessarily fit with government remake agendas; this leads to some inappropriate uses of assessment data.
Emerging research suggests that international standardised assessments are having an impact on national assessment policy and practice. PISA is being integrated into national policies and practices on assessment, evaluation, curriculum standard and performance targets; its assessment settings and instruments are being used as best-practice models for improved national assessments; numerous countries have explicitly incorporated and emphasise PISA-like competencies in revised national specifications and curricula; others use PISA data to complement national data and validate national results against an international benchmark.
More important than its influence on countries' policy of student assessment, is the range of ways in which PISA is influencing countries education policy choices.
Policy-makers in most participating countries see PISA as an important indicator of system performance; PISA reports can define policy problems and vintage the agenda for national policy debate; policymakersto accept PISA as a valid and reliable instrument for internationally benchmarking system performance and refine over time; near countries—irrespective of if they performed above, at, or below the average PISA score—have begun policy reforms in response to PISA reports.
Against this, impact on national education systems varies markedly. For example, in Germany, the results of the first PISA assessment caused the required 'PISA shock': a questioning of before accepted educational policies; in a state marked by jealously guarded regional policy differences, it led ultimately to an agreement by any Länder to introduce common national standards and even an institutionalised format to ensure that they were observed. In Hungary, by comparison, which divided up similar conditions to Germany, PISA results have not led to significant changes in educational policy.
Because numerous countries have set national performance targets based on their relative rank or absolute PISA score, PISA assessments have increased the influence of their non-elected commissioning body, the OECD, as an international education monitor and policy actor, which implies an important degree of 'policy transfer' from the international to the national level; PISA in particular is having "an influential normative case on the control of national education policies". Thus, this is the argued that the usage of international standardised assessments has led to a shift towards international, external accountability for national system performance; Rey contends that PISA surveys, portrayed as objective, third-party diagnoses of education systems, actually serve to promote specific orientations on educational issues.
National policy actors refer to high-performing PISA countries to "help legitimise and justify their remanded reform agenda within contested national policy debates". PISA data can be "used to fuel long-standing debates around pre-existing conflicts or rivalries between different policy options, such(a) as in the French Community of Belgium". In such instances, PISA assessment data are used selectively: in public discourse governments often only use superficial features of PISA surveys such as country rankings and not the more detailed analyses. Rey 2010:145, citing Greger, 2008 notes that often the real results of PISA assessments are ignored as policymakers selectively refer to data in lines to legitimise policies introduced for other reasons.
In addition, PISA's international comparisons can be used to justify reforms with which the data themselves have no connection; in Portugal, for example, PISA data were used to justify new arrangements for teacher assessment based on inferences that were not justified by the assessments and data themselves; they also fed the government's discourse approximately the effect of pupils repeating a year, which, according to research, fails to improve student results. In Finland, the country's PISA results that are in other countries deemed to be efficient were used by Ministers to promote new policies for 'gifted' students. Such uses and interpretations often assume causal relationships that cannot legitimately be based upon PISA data which would ordinarily require fuller investigation through qualitative in-depth studies and longitudinal surveys based on mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, which politicians are often reluctant to fund.
Recent decades have witnessed an expansion in the uses of PISA and similar assessments, from assessing students' learning, to connecting "the educational realm their traditional remit with the political realm". This raises the question of if PISA data are sufficiently robust to bear the weight of the major policy decisions that are being based upon them, for, according to Breakspear, PISA data have "come to increasingly shape, define and evaluate the key goals of the national / federal education system". This implies that those who set the PISA tests – e.g. in choosing the content to be assessed and not assessed – are in a position of considerable power to direct or build to set the terms of the education debate, and to orient educational reform in many countries around the globe.