Next Tuesday, September 8, the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the largest international education assessment in the world promoted by the OECD, will be released. Ninety-one countries participate, and Spain is among them. But what is PISA and what is it for?
Who does it assess?
It assesses what 15-year-olds know and are able to do with what they know at the end of their Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO). If they have not repeated a year, they are between 3rd and 4th year of ESO because the OECD analyzes students born in 2009, regardless of their academic trajectory. It does not measure memorized content but competencies. How they apply what they have learned.
Not all students of that age take the exam but a sample from each territory. The sample must be representative of it and is established based on many variables (gender, socioeconomic composition, type of school…). In Spain, about 40,000 students from a thousand educational centers participated.
All autonomous communities finance an expansion of the initial sample for Spain. This allows obtaining disaggregated results with statistical validity for each territory, equating them to independent countries in the analyses. The sample from Catalonia will not be representative in this edition due to a sampling error. In Spain, these tests are coordinated by the National Institute for Educational Evaluation (INEE) of the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training.
How are they assessed?
The results are expressed on a scoring scale with an average set at 500 points. Spain obtained in PISA 2022, just after the pandemic, a score of 472 in mathematics, 476 in language, and 485 in science. Student performance levels range from 1 (the lowest) to 6, and each country can know what proportion of its students reach the most advanced levels or remain at the lowest.
What does it assess?
Three core competencies considered fundamental in all systems worldwide are assessed: mathematics, reading, and science. Each edition focuses more deeply on one of the three. In PISA 2025 (so called because it was held in the first half of that year), the subject evaluated with greater intensity is science.
In addition to these three, there are several collateral assessments. Each cycle explores an innovative competency, such as collaborative problem solving in 2015, global competence in 2018, and creative thinking in 2022. In this edition, the aim was to analyze students’ proficiency in solving problems through the digital world.
The results of this competency, along with foreign language (English), which has also been introduced for the first time, will be known next spring.
Why do they matter?
Spain’s results, which usually position below the OECD average, influence the political agenda, curricular reforms, and resource allocation. The positions each report generates are recurrent. The Socialist government highlights that the Spanish system is more resilient compared to others and improves the school dropout rate. The Popular Party usually points to the results as proof of the need for greater academic rigor. Sumar calls for more investment in equity, and other parties criticize the effects of the new education law in the international comparison. Other educational community agents such as teachers and families point out that there are other assessments that also evaluate competencies.
Who cares?
Families with children in ESO, teachers who prepare those students, those responsible for educational policies, and any citizen interested in the quality of the education system.
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For administrations, this type of assessment is fundamental to deciding educational policies. It provides a perspective on the educational performance of the entire citizenry and a comparison with other countries. It identifies strengths and weaknesses of the education system.
Additionally, PISA collects data on the socioeconomic environment of families, school climate, and technology use, which allows relating performance to external factors. Factors such as equity and inclusion are fundamental to identifying and correcting inequalities in certain groups of students (immigrants, women, people with disabilities, etc.). For this reason, particular questions are also asked to students about their situation and that of their family.
How did Spain do?
Spain dropped in PISA 2022 due to the effect of the Covid pandemic, which affected children’s learning and emotional well-being. The same happened in all countries. In Spain, the drop was not as severe, which was related to the confinement period being shorter than in other OECD countries. However, the Spanish system has been losing points since 2018 in the three evaluated subjects. In mathematics and language, Spain was at the level of Germany, France, Portugal, or Norway.
Catalonia, however, plummeted. It lost in seven years the equivalent of almost two school years in reading and 18 months in mathematics and science.
What happened in Catalonia?
Catalonia has been excluded from the international comparison. Educational centers excluded 23% of students from the test because they believed they were not capable of taking it. The stated reason was that the students had learning difficulties or behavioral problems. Only a small part of the excluded were students of immigrant origin. The OECD recommends not exceeding a 5% rate. Only five centers met this percentage while about ten centers exceeded 40% exclusion.
As a result of the sample not being representative of the Catalan population, the organization decided to exclude Catalonia from the international comparison.
However, the ministry intends to publish Catalonia’s data with this exclusion, although they are not valid. It will do so with an asterisk indicating that they are not suitable for comparison with other autonomous communities.
The Catalan incidence put the tests for the whole of Spain at risk, but the OECD validation and supervision committees determined that the Spanish sample was not affected.
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