Among its many findings, our PISA 2018 assessment shows that 15-year-old students in the four provinces/municipalities of China that participated in the study – Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang – outperformed by a large margin their peers from all of the other 78 participating education systems, in mathematics and science. Moreover, the 10 % most disadvantaged students in these four jurisdictions also showed better reading skills than those of the average student in OECD countries, as well as skills similar to the 10 % most advantaged students in some of these countries. True, these four provinces/municipalities in eastern China are far from representing China as a whole, but the size of each of them compares to that of a typical OECD country, and their combined populations amount to over 180 million. What makes their achievement even more remarkable is that the level of income of these four Chinese regions is well below the OECD average. The quality of their schools today will feed into the strength of their economies tomorrow.

Up to the end of the 1990s, OECD comparisons of education outcomes were mainly based on measures of years of schooling, which are not reliable indicators of what people are actually able to do. With the Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, we tried to change this. The transformational idea behind PISA lay in testing the skills of students directly, through a metric that was internationally agreed upon; linking that with data from students, teachers, schools and systems to understand performance differences; and then harnessing the power of collaboration to act on the data, both by creating shared points of reference and by leveraging peer pressure.

Reading proficiency is essential for a wide variety of human activities – from following instructions in a manual; to finding out the who, what, when, where and why of an event; to communicating with others for a specific purpose or transaction. PISA recognises that evolving technologies have changed the ways people read and exchange information, whether at home, at school or in the workplace. Digitalisation has resulted in the emergence and availability of new forms of text, ranging from the concise (text messages; annotated search-engine results) to the lengthy (tabbed, multipage websites; newly accessible archival material scanned from microfiches). In response, education systems are increasingly incorporating digital (reading) literacy into their programmes of instruction.

The data referred to in this volume are presented in Annex B and, in greater detail, including additional tables, on the PISA website (www.oecd.org/pisa).

PISA is a triennial survey of 15-year-old students around the world that assesses the extent to which they have acquired key knowledge and skills essential for full participation in social and economic life. PISA assessments do not just ascertain whether students near the end of their compulsory education can reproduce what they have learned; they also examine how well students can extrapolate from what they have learned and apply their knowledge in unfamiliar settings, both in and outside of school.

Reading was the focus of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2018. This chapter discusses how PISA defined and measured reading literacy. Differences between the PISA 2018 reading test and that of previous PISA assessments are highlighted. The chapter also explains what is meant by adaptive testing – the new way students progress through the assessment.

This chapter presents information about the methods behind the analysis of PISA data and how to interpret the score values; it does not contain results of the PISA 2018 tests. The chapter summarises the test-development and scaling procedures used to ensure that results are comparable across countries and with the results of previous PISA assessments, and explains how the score values can be interpreted.

This chapter describes the students in the PISA target population, or those who were eligible to sit the PISA assessment. It discusses the extent to which this target population represented (or covered) the total population. The chapter also presents the grade distribution of the students who participated in the assessment.

This chapter compares students’ mean scores and the variation in their performance in reading, mathematics and science across the countries and economies that participated in the PISA 2018 assessment. It also highlights differences in social and economic contexts across education systems.

This chapter presents the various levels of proficiency that students exhibited in the PISA 2018 reading assessment. It describes what students can do at each level of proficiency using items from the actual assessment and the field trial that preceded it. The chapter presents how many students performed at each proficiency level. It then discusses student performance in various specific aspects of reading.

This chapter describes the range of mathematical competences assessed in PISA 2018 and reports the proportion of students who performed at each level of proficiency.

This chapter describes the range of science competences assessed in PISA 2018 and reports the proportion of students who performed at each level of proficiency.

This chapter discusses short-term changes in student performance – both in mean performance and in the performance distribution – in the PISA assessment between 2015 and 2018.

This chapter reviews trends in mean performance, and in performance at the various levels of proficiency measured by PISA, between earlier PISA assessments (prior to 2015) and 2018.

This chapter describes how PISA helps countries monitor progress towards the internationally agreed targets of quality and equity in education, and how PISA contributes to improving the capacity of countries to develop relevant data.

Items from Rapa Nui, the released unit from the PISA 2018 reading assessment, and items used in the assessment of reading fluency

In Albania, mean performance improved, from initially low levels, across all three subjects (reading, mathematics and science). In all three subjects, improvements at the bottom of the performance distribution outpaced improvements observed at the top, resulting in narrowing performance gaps between the highest- and lowest-achieving students. Improvements in mean performance were particularly rapid in mathematics (about 20 points, on average, per 3-year period). The proportion of students who scored below Level 2 in mathematics (low-achieving students) shrank by 18 percentage points between 2012 and 2018.

PISA is a collaborative effort, bringing together experts from the participating countries, steered jointly by their governments on the basis of shared, policy-driven interests.