ABSTRACT
In 2007, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published results from the third round of the Programme for International Assessment (PISA) which, every three years since 2000, has tested the reading, mathematics and science achievement of 15-year-olds in a number of the OECD's member countries and other jurisdictions. One particular feature of the Finnish system that attracted much attention was the fact that in Finland, teachers enjoy quite high social status. One interesting feature of the various international comparisons that have been undertaken over the last 50 years or so is that while the correlations between different measures are reasonably high, some countries do much better on one measure than another. One of the most significant challenges in comparing the mathematics performance of students in different countries is making sure that teachers are using similar tests.
