May 8 -- The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Department of Education (ED) invites comments by July 7, 2023 regarding the Program for International Student Assessment 2025 (PISA 2025) Main Study Recruitment and Field Test.
The Program for International Student Assessments (PISA) is an international assessment of 15-year-olds, which focuses on assessing students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy. PISA was first administered in 2000 and is typically conducted every three years. The United States has participated in all of the previous cycles and planned to participate in 2021 in order to track trends and to compare the performance of U.S. students with that of students in other education systems. PISA is sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In the United States, PISA is conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), within the U.S. Department of Education.
In each administration of PISA, one of the subject areas (reading, mathematics, or science literacy) is the major domain and has the broadest content coverage, while the other two subjects are the minor domains. PISA emphasizes functional skills that students have acquired as they near the end of mandatory schooling (aged 15 years), and students' knowledge and skills gained both in and out of school environments. Other areas may also be assessed, such as, in the case of PISA 2025, Learning in a Digital World (LDW), which will be an innovative domain in 2025. PISA assesses students' knowledge and skills gained both in and out of school environments. In addition to the cognitive assessments described above, PISA 2025 will include questionnaires administered to school principals and assessed students. To prepare for the main study, PISA countries will conduct a field test in the spring of the year previous, primarily to evaluate newly developed assessment and questionnaire items but also to test the assessment operations.
This request is to conduct PISA 2025 main study recruitment and the PISA 2025 field test. This submission requests all burden for both the field test (scheduled for early 2024) and the main study (scheduled for late 2025), and presents materials (including recruitment and communications materials) and the final international drafts of the field test instruments. As part of this submission, NCES is publishing a notice in the Federal Register allowing first a 60- and then a 30-day public comment period. We anticipate that some materials will be revised after the 60-day public comment period and encourage stakeholders to see individual documents for details. The materials that will be used in the 2025 main study will be based upon the field test materials included in this submission. Additionally, this submission is designed to adequately justify the need for and overall practical utility of the full study and to present the overarching plan for all of the phases of the data collection, providing as much detail about the measures to be used as is available at the time of this submission.
We plan to submit a revision (along with a 30-day public comment period) in October 2023 in order to clear the final US version of the field test instrument, as well as finalize any updated materials for use in the 2024 field test. In order to begin recruiting schools for the main study by October 2024, we will submit a change-request to OMB in May 2024 with the final main study recruitment materials and parental consent letters, details about any changes to the design and procedures for the main study, and updates to the respondent burden estimates for the main study data collection. Subsequently in spring 2025 we will submit a clearance request, with a 30-day public comment period notice published in the Federal Register, with the final main study procedures and instruments for data collection in the fall of 2025.
OECD PISA
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/
NCES PISA
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/
Draft data collection instrument and technical documentation:
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/ED-2023-SCC-0077/document
FRN:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-09650