The assessment of the science component of the OECD’s PISA project introduced a radically new intention for the assessment of science learning and operationalized this with a novel instrument that included item types that had not previously been used in such large-scale testing, either nationally or internationally.
The OECD’s commission for the PISA project in 1998 was to provide information to participating countries about how well prepared their 15-year-old students were for twentieth-first-century life in the domains of reading, mathematics, and science – an unusually prospective brief for the assessment of learning. Fifteen-year-old students were chosen because, in a number of countries, it is the age when compulsory study of science and mathematics can cease.
This commission required PISA Science to be not another retrospective assessment of students’ science learning, as is customary at the levels of classroom, school, regional, national, and international assessments (like...
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Fensham, P. (2013). Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In: Gunstone, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Science Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6165-0_75-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6165-0_75-1
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