In the 12 years since its inception, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has become a major player in the education policies in many countries (Gorur, 2011a; Grek, 2009). It’s rankings have sent some countries into shock, whilst others have emerged as models to be emulated (Ertl, 2006). However, while PISA rankings have been enormously influential, my previous research on PISA and policy indicated that there is a level of dissatisfaction and anxiety among PISA officials that the PISA data base was being under-utilised to inform policies and practices (Gorur, 2011b). One interviewee, for example, said:

I actually think the PISA data is very rich, but the kind of public reports they [OECD] produce – the international report and the country reports - only scrape the surface of the database. There are a lot more stories that can be found even at the classroom level. … [M]y sense is that there haven’t been enough people to actually do that secondary analysis....There are some attempts – and you get to hear them at some of the IEA conferences – but the big reports can only tell limited stories. (Interview transcript: PISA analyst)

Discussions involving the secondary analysis of PISA and the lessons that might be learned from them appear to be confined to measurement conferences, or possibly to commissioned government reports which are not available to educators at large.

Following these findings, I became curious about the nature and extent of secondary analysis of PISA. This paper presents the preliminary results of a funded project which examines questions such as: Who is using these data bases? What kinds of questions are they asking? Who is funding these projects? Who are the audience/consumers of these studies? Allied to this are a set of broader questions: What are the features of secondary analysis as a knowledge practice? What are the affordances and constraints? What are the actual practices of secondary analysis, and to what extent do these practices mediate the usefulness of the knowledge they produce?

Using resources from science and technology studies, this paper takes an ethnographic approach to examine the nature, scale and scope of the PISA data base and what it affords in terms of secondary analysis, and some aspects of secondary analysis as a contemporary form of knowledge practice.

Given the widespread influence and interest in PISA, this paper has global relevance.

Ertl, H. (2006). Educational Standards and the Changing Discourse on Education: The reception and consequences of the PISA study in Germany. Oxford Review of Education, 32(5), 619-634. Gorur, R. (2011a). ANT on the PISA Trail: Following the Statistical Pursuit of Certainty. Educational Philosophy & Theory, 43(5-6), 76-93. Gorur, R. (2011b). Policy Assemblage in Education. (PhD), University of Melbourne. Grek, S. (2009). Governing by Numbers: the PISA 'effect' in Europe. Journal of Education Policy, 24(1), 23-37. Knorr Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge: Harvard University Press.