Assessment of Reading Literacy in PISA-D: Connotation, Framework Design and Enlightenment

To assist low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in participating in international education assessment, diagnosing their education systems, and advancing education-related Sustainable Development Goals, the PISA-D project has achieved three key innovations based on PISA. Firstly, it expanded assessment targets to include both in-school students and out-of-school youth through categorized design, filling the gap in traditional assessments that neglect out-of-school populations. Secondly, it developed a "downward-compatible" reading literacy assessment framework, adding the lower-difficulty Level 1c and optimizing item difficulty distribution to accurately reflect students' performance in LMICs. Thirdly, it designed contextual questionnaires based on Willms' prosperity model, refining equity and equality indicators to comprehensively capture deep-seated factors influencing academic performance. These innovations provide significant references for China to improve compulsory education Chinese subject assessment, particularly in enhancing the sensitivity of assessing vulnerable groups and optimizing the regional education quality monitoring system.