Is your young person representing New Zealand?

Next week on Wednesday, August the 6th, some of our students will participate in the PISA assessment. It will involve around 54 randomly selected students from Year 10 to Year 12 but the majority of our students participating will be in Year 11. If your young person has been selected, you should have received an email.

The assessment doesn't need to be prepared or revised for. The students just need to head to K09 on Wednesday with their laptops, calculators and a pen and pencil. We hope you will support us in encouraging them to get along. We will provide some snacks and there will be several breaks.

If you have any questions, please contact Ms Dick dk@otagogirls.school.nz

What is PISA? PISA stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment, sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) whose mission is to “better policies for better lives”. 

PISA is a 4-yearly study of 15-year-olds’ scientific, reading, and mathematical literacy which are foundational for informed citizenship in the modern world.  In 2025, PISA also measures Learning in the Digital World which measures students’ capacity to engage in an iterative process of knowledge building and problem solving using computational tools. The two competencies essential for this are 1) self-directed learning and 2) scientific inquiry practices.

PISA 2025 is the ninth PISA assessment that has been conducted since 2000 and involves around 91 participating countries/economies.  

Undertaking PISA is important because the results are used to: 

• Indicate how well-prepared New Zealand ākonga | students are to meet real-life opportunities and challenges after they finish school.  

• Monitor progress towards its goals such as raising achievement and reducing inequity by observing whether literacy and well-being is improving, remaining stable or declining over time.

 • Examine New Zealand’s performance relative to the rest of the world to learn from the experiences of other countries and for us to spread our current practices. 

• Identify areas for improvement. 

We hope that if your young person is selected that you will support them to participate. It will be a digital test that will run over three hours and will have several breaks and snacks will be made available.

More information about PISA can be found on the OECD website -  https://www.oecd.org/pisa/.