Once upon a time, when Michael Gove was Secretary of State for education, PISA was all the rage (for the uninitiated, PISA is the Programme for International Student Assessment, which compares the performance of 15-year-olds across nearly 100 countries in reading, mathematics and science). As I noted at the time, international evidence was then en vogue, with PISA in particular featuring prominently in education debates. But is PISA now receiving less attention than it use to? In a new academic paper, I take a look…
To investigate whether PISA is now receiving less attention than previously, I draw on data from Google Trends. In a nutshell, this provides information on the number of searches made for a given topic (e.g. PISA) in a given geography (e.g. England) over a given time horizon. A monthly or daily score between 0 (very few Google searches) and 100 (most Google searches over the given time period) is then returned. A value of 50 on this scale would then indicate that half as many searches were made for the topic relative to its peak.
Figure 1 presents the trend for Google searches made for PISA across the UK between 2006 and 2022. Once can instantly see three or four large spikes in the trend.
These coincide with when the results from PISA were released. “Peak PISA” in the UK was December 2013, when Michael Gove was in office and pushing through his reforms and the results from the 2012 round were released.
