Since 2000 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) has been focused on assessing the acquisition of knowledge and skills 15 year olds need in future life. This programme covers three core domains of student literacy – reading, mathematics and science – with an in-depth study of each in a three year cycle. These major domains were reading literacy in 2000, mathematical literacy in 2003 and, finally, scientific literacy in 2006.

This paper has two main goals, the first of which is to map European Union countries according to students’ reading, mathematical and scientific literacy for cross-country comparisons. From the starting point that the countries’ profiles are simultaneously structured by the three assessed domains, we explored the inter-relationships among the three PISA scales. A graphical display was used for representing the interaction among these skills. Countries were overlapped in that geometric space so that groups of countries could be identified in terms of literacy performance. We then examined whether we could group the EU countries in different strata according their performance in reading, mathematical and scientific literacy, therefore an exploration of cluster structure in PISA 2006 was done.

The next step in our research is to identify which factors affect students’ mathematical, scientific and reading performance. The literature reveals that socio-economic background and cultural environment explain mathematic achievement (Grootenboer and Hemmings, 2007).

In the Pisa context, our aim was to develop a model of mediation to explain students’ mathematics, scientific and reading achievement. To this end, we identified different blocks of predictors – socio-economic background and cultural environment – and the mediator variables – student practices and perceptions about future. We explored whether students’ practices and perceptions mediate the relations between socio-economic background and cultural environment and students’ achievements in the three PISA scales.

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