The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) assesses 15-year-old students in mathematics, reading, and science literacy. It also surveys students about educational experiences and interests and school principals about school contexts. PISA 2009 results were released in December 2010. The U.S. data files, now available on the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) website, contain U.S.-specific variables, such as student race/ethnicity, that are not available in the international data files. 

The Technical Report and User's Guide for PISA 2009 describes how PISA 2009 was conducted in the United States, as well as how to use the U.S. data files to conduct statistical analyses.

The PISA 2009 U.S. public-use data files include U.S.-specific variables. 

The U.S. restricted-use data file, available through a restricted-use data license, allows users to link U.S. PISA schools with other school data collected by NCES. 

The Restricted-Use Data Supplement describes the variables in the restricted-use data file and how to merge them with the public-use data files.

PISA public-use data are also available in the International Data Explorer (IDE), an on-line analysis tool on the NCES website. The public- and restricted-use data files are intended for experienced researchers who cannot meet their complex analytical needs with the IDE. 

For more information about PISA, go to http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa.

The data and documentation are products of the National Center for Education Statistics at the Institute of Education Sciences, part of the U.S. Department of Education. Visit http://nces.ed.gov for more information about NCES.