ACER shapes future of global reading for PISA 2029

PISA assesses how well 15-year-old students can apply their reading, mathematics and science knowledge to solve real-world problems, providing one of the world's most influential sources of evidence on educational outcomes. 

ACER is the OECD's international contractor responsible for the design and implementation of PISA globally. PISA 2025 involved 91 countries and economies, including 760,000 students representing approximately 33 million students worldwide. 

ACER is now leading the development of new reading assessment materials for PISA 2029, helping ensure the assessment reflects the ways young people read, evaluate and use information today. 

Developing assessment materials for an international programme such as PISA requires close collaboration with experts and participating countries throughout the development cycle. 

As part of the initiative, ACER’s Research Director for Assessment Development Dr Dara Ramalingam, and Research Fellow from ACER’s Assessment Transformation team Jonathan Heard, facilitated an item development workshop at the OECD in Paris.  

Nineteen representatives from 12 countries, including the United States, Spain, Norway, Morrocco and Czechia, took part in the workshop aimed at supporting countries and economies to submit reading assessment material for PISA 2029.  

National submissions help ensure PISA assessment materials reflect a broad range of cultures, contexts and education systems, and are included alongside items developed by expert test developers. Dara and Jonathan also ran an item development workshop in Melbourne in June.  

A further workshop was conducted in Spanish by Dr Lis Cercadillo, ACER’s consultant, in Santiago, Chile. This workshop in Latin America was conducted in collaboration with the OECD and longtime Chilean PISA national project manager Ema Lagos. 

Shaping how reading is assessed internationally 

The Paris visit also included a meeting of the PISA Reading Expert Group which advises ACER on how the new reading framework should be operationalised in PISA assessments.  

The meeting was only one of two in-person meetings planned with the Reading Expert Group across the cycle to 2030. 

'The group’s work is critical, because the reading framework will influence how reading is assessed internationally for years to come' Dr Ramalingam said. 

'Reading is changing, and assessment needs to keep pace with the skills students need now.  That includes thinking critically about sources and engaging with many different kinds of texts.’  

The new framework places stronger emphasis on critical reflection and reaffirms the centrality of narrative texts. It also introduces word-level fluency tasks to better capture what students at the lowest proficiency levels can do. 

While the workshops and expert group meeting focused on highly technical aspects of assessment design, they also provided an important opportunity to strengthen relationships across the PISA community.  

‘Developing an international assessment is a highly collaborative process,’ Dr Ramalingam said.  

‘The workshops and expert group meetings give us an opportunity to draw on a wide range of perspectives and to work through challenging questions together." 

As education systems grapple with rapid technological change and artificial intelligence, PISA 2029 will provide an important international lens on the knowledge and skills young people need. ACER’s work with expert groups, national centres and the OECD is helping ensure that lens is robust, inclusive and relevant.