The perceived impact of PISA on student learning in schools in a local Chinese context

Abstract The increasing concerns of the impact of the Programmes for International Student Assessment (PISA) on education policymaking along with its global reach call for the need of evaluating PISA’s impact on student learning. However, most extant studies focus on arguing its impact at the policy level, without taking a further look into it at the local and school levels. This paper empirically investigates the impact of PISA on student learning in schools in a local Chinese context, that is, the Fangshan District of Beijing, through engaging local stakeholders’ perspectives. Based on the interviews with local educational policymakers and practitioners, the findings reveal that PISA has motivated substantive local policy initiatives aimed at improving student learning, which have been enacted in schools to varying degrees. In many of these initiatives, some PISA concepts were incorporated in different ways. We discuss PISA’s impact on the local educational policy and propose a provisional mechanism of its impact on student learning in schools.