This paper examines how findings from the international survey of adult skills (PIAAC) are assembled within the public media in participating countries and enrolled into national narratives. Taking a socio-material approach, it focuses on the travelling artefacts of PIAAC and the social relations and processes through which the tests are materialized within national contexts. A multi-national corpus of media reports were examined to determine what issues, demographics and numbers are highlighted; how credibility is established for the findings and what policy-related implications are drawn. Selected findings from France, the UK and Japan are analysed by following the sources and trails of interconnected media texts and artefacts including blogs, tweets, online reports and readers’ comments, images and data charts. Despite the active efforts of the OECD to mobilize media responses and to guide public interpretation of the findings, the national accounts assembled not only depend on the test results but on their fit with existing cultural preoccupations, fears and debates. The paper considers how far the densely networked, interactive nature of contemporary digital media aids PIAAC to escape from the distant policy intent of its creators and even prises open the black box containing the workings of the test itself.