PISA for Development: enhancement of the cognitive instruments

The overall performance of 15-year-old students in all of the middle-income countries that participated in PISA 2012, except Viet Nam, was lower than that of students in OECD countries, and varies widely. To make PISA more relevant for low- and middle-income countries, PISA for Development (PISA-D) enhances the assessment to better measure the competencies of 15-year-olds performing at lower levels of proficiency while maintaining comparability with PISA. PISA-D cognitive instruments have a greater number of test items at the baseline level of proficiency and below to give a fine-grained indication of the knowledge and skills of lower-performing 15-year-olds – valuable information for designing quality-improving programmes.