As part of its contribution to the post-2015 education framework, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) proposes to enhance its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to make it more relevant to developing countries. These ideas, outlined in a new OECD brochure , are set out here by Michael Davidson, Michael Ward and Alejandro Gomez Palma of the OECD.

The OECD now plans to enhance the policy relevance of PISA for a broader set of developing countries through the PISA for Development initiative. The initiative will develop enhanced PISA survey instruments that are more relevant to developing countries but that produce scores that are on the same scales as the main PISA assessment. This initiative will enable future PISA cycles to offer developing countries more tailored and relevant policy analysis and insights.Planning for the 2015 cycle is under way and numerous developing countries that had not participated in previous PISA cycles have expressed interest in taking part.

PISA could provide significant benefits to the post-2015 global learning agenda:

• A single reference point against which to rigorously gauge progress towards targets for educational quality and equity.
• A robust measure of progress allowing all countries – regardless of their starting points – to set targets for improvement that are referenced to common international goals.
• Credible and comparable results, as PISA requires that participating countries follow common technical, institutional and administrative standards.
• An opportunity for participating countries to improve their ability to assess learning.