Summary

The interest of countries and economies in being compared and evaluated using international rankings has grown over the past 16 years. Thus, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has achieved enormous popularity, being considered the most important standardized test for assessing the skills of 15-year-old students. The aim of this paper is to determine the influence of PISA on education policy in different countries in the last 16 years. A systematic literature review was conducted between September and November 2015, using the EBSCO, ProQuest, and SSRN databases. Some 25 articles that met the inclusion criteria were collected and analyzed. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) exerts a powerful influence through PISA, mediated by the periodic publication of working papers, policy analysis, and recommendations. The organization links educational success with the economic growth of a country, demonstrating its interest in using education as a tool to generate competitiveness and contribute to the economy. Nevertheless, many changes in global educational policy have been triggered by the release of PISA results. It has been used, for example, to support changes in education systems and for the identification of reference countries, among other things. There is no doubt that the influence of PISA will continue to grow, providing a basis for the creation of a new education policy with international influence.