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This paper examines the expansion of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and associated growth in the influence of the OECD's education work. PISA has become one of the OECD's most successful 'products' and has both strengthened the role of the Directorate for Education within the organization and enhanced the significance of the organization in education globally. We provide an overview of the OECD, including organizational changes in response to globalization and the changing place of the Directorate for Education within the organization, particularly with the development of PISA in the late 1990s. We show how the OECD is expanding PISA by broadening the scope of what is measured; increasing the scale of the assessment to cover more countries, systems and schools; and enhancing its explanatory power to provide policy-makers with better information. The OECD has also developed the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and PISA-based Tests for Schools, which draw on the PISA template to extend the influence of its education work to new sites. The paper draws on data from 33 interviews with past and present personnel from the OECD, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the English and Australian education systems, as well as analysis of relevant OECD documents. We argue that PISA, and the OECD's education work more broadly, has facilitated new epistemological and infrastructural modes of global governance for the OECD in education.

International large-scale assessments such as PISA or PIAAC have started to provide public or scientific use files for log data; that is, events, event-related attributes and timestamps of test-takers’ interactions with the assessment system. Log data and the process indicators derived from it can be used for many purposes. However, the intended uses and interpretations of process indicators require validation, which here means a theoretical and/or empirical justification that inferences about (latent) attributes of the test-taker’s work process are valid. This article reviews and synthesizes measurement concepts from various areas, including the standard assessment paradigm, the continuous assessment approach, the evidence-centered design (ECD) framework, and test validation. Based on this synthesis, we address the questions of how to ensure the valid interpretation of process indicators by means of an evidence-centered design of the task situation, and how to empirically challenge the intended interpretation of process indicators by developing and implementing correlational and/or experimental validation strategies. For this purpose, we explicate the process of reasoning from log data to low-level features and process indicators as the outcome of evidence identification. In this process, contextualizing information from log data is essential in order to reduce interpretative ambiguities regarding the derived process indicators. Finally, we show that empirical validation strategies can be adapted from classical approaches investigating the nomothetic span and construct representation. Two worked examples illustrate possible validation strategies for the design phase of measurements and their empirical evaluation.

Practice Engagement Theory (PET) posits that individuals' literacy proficiencies develop as a by-product of their engagement in everyday reading and writing practices and, reciprocally, that literacy proficiencies affect levels of engagement in reading and writing practices. This suggests that literacy training which increases engagement in meaningful practices might generate proficiency growth. Research has shown that this approach does indeed seem to be effective in improving (adult) learners' literacy proficiency. A number of cross-sectional comparisons of participants' and non-participants' performance in various training activities, as well as quantitative modelling of adults' proficiency growth in longitudinal studies have confirmed the theoretical assumptions of PET. The authors of this article describe the first application of PET to literacy and numeracy development in a longitudinal study of a nationally representative adult population. Their investigation followed a sample of adults initially interviewed and assessed in the German component of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), adding longitudinal data from three additional waves of the national extension study (PIAAC-L), which included repeated assessments of literacy and numeracy proficiency over a period of three years. The authors' quantitative modelling of the growth of literacy and numeracy proficiency over time provides strong support for PET. Their comparisons of how various practice engagement indexes predict growth of literacy and numeracy proficiencies indicate that reading engagement is the strongest predictor of literacy growth and maths engagement is the strongest predictor of numeracy growth. The authors conclude their article by considering their findings' implications for sustainable development, lifelong learning policy and future research into the development of adult literacy and numeracy proficiency.

Historically, numeracy has tended to be forgotten and overlooked in adult education, especially compared to literacy. Yet evidence exists to show that numeracy should be made a priority, and that building the foundational numeracy skills of young people and adults is vital for their well-being in work and life in the 21st century. In the past three decades, there has been an increasing awareness of the role and importance of mathematics and numeracy skills in adult life. This concerns every adult as an individual, as a member of society and as a worker, and how proficiency in these areas is critical in underpinning the skills necessary to negotiate the challenges of 21st-century life. This article describes how this growing understanding and awareness of numeracy has been enhanced through the evolution of the assessment of numeracy in international adult skills surveys. It began with the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) in the 1990s, continued with the Adult Literacy and Lifeskills (ALL) survey in the mid-2000s, and in 2011 finally led to the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The latter’s second cycle is due to start collecting data in 2021–2022 and the results are due to be published in 2023. The development and ongoing refinement of the theoretical frameworks and constructs that underpin these programmes and the assessments themselves, alongside the research based on the rich data of empirical and background information emerging from these surveys, have contributed significantly to our knowledge and understanding of numeracy in people’s lives. Évolution de l’apprentissage du calcul, de la littératie quantitative à la numératie: les enseignements des évaluations internationales – Historiquement, l’éducation des adultes a eu tendance à oublier et à négliger l’apprentissage du calcul, par rapport à l’alphabétisation notamment. Toutefois, certains éléments prouvent qu’il faudrait faire de l’apprentissage du calcul une priorité et qu’au 21e siècle, il est crucial de développer les compétences arithmétiques de base des jeunes et des adultes pour leur bien-être professionnel et privé. Ces trois dernières décennies, on s’est de plus en plus rendu compte du rôle et de l’importance des compétences mathématiques et arithmétiques à l’âge adulte. Ceci s’applique à tous les adultes en tant qu’individus, membres de la société et travailleurs, et à la mesure dans laquelle la maîtrise de ces disciplines est essentielle comme base des compétences nécessaires pour faire face aux défis de la vie au 21e siècle. Cet article décrit comment la compréhension et la sensibilisation croissantes à l’égard de l’apprentissage du calcul se sont améliorées grâce à l’évolution de l’évaluation de la numératie dans les enquêtes internationales sur les compétences des adultes, ce qui a commencé avec l’Enquête internationale sur l’alphabétisation des adultes (EIAA) dans les années 90, avant de continuer à la moitié des années 2000 avec l’Enquête sur l’alphabétisation et l’autonomie fonctionnelle des adultes (ALL) avant de conduire enfin en 2011 au Programme pour l’évaluation internationale des compétences des adultes (PIAAC). Le second volet de ce dernier doit démarrer en 2021-2022 avec la collecte de données, la publication des résultats étant prévue pour 2023. Le développement et le perfectionnement constant des cadres et structures théoriques qui sous-tendent ces programmes et les évaluations elles-mêmes, au même titre que les recherches s’appuyant sur des informations empiriques et contextuelles émergeant de ces enquêtes, ont considérablement enrichi notre connaissance et notre compréhension de l’apprentissage du calcul dans la vie des gens.

In this study, we examined relationships between learning environment characteristics (disciplinary climate, teacher support, and teacher feedback) and student outcomes (enjoyment of reading, and reading achievement) among 12,058 students from China who took part in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment. The results of structural equation modeling analyses revealed that teacher feedback and enjoyment of reading each had a statistically significant association with reading achievement. Additionally, enjoyment of reading mediated the association between teacher feedback and reading achievement.