How does PISA for Development measure reading literacy?

The term “reading literacy” as used in PISA includes a wide range of cognitive competencies, from basic decoding, to knowledge of words, grammar and larger linguistic and textual structures and features, to knowledge about the world. Building on the OECD’s experience with measuring reading literacy in middle-income countries, PISA for Development (PISA-D) extends PISA’s reading literacy framework to better measure basic processes, such as comprehending sentences and longer texts. In particular, the PISA-D reading test measures skills, such as understanding the meaning of individual written words and short phrases, thus allowing countries to know more about the kinds of tasks 15-year-olds with poor reading proficiency can perform.