ABSTRACT. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has become a major and influential component of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) educational work. This paper examines national reports relating to PISA 2000, 2003, 2006 and 2009 published on the OECD website in order to identify examples that illustrate the construction of education narratives. These examples are taken from reports from English, German and Nordic speaking countries. When the narratives are analysed, it becomes evident that PISA enables and leads to the production of a variety of different narratives. In this paper ontological, epistemological and reform narratives are examined to demonstrate how the various narratives are constructed through the reporting and discussion of national results. The paper concludes that by means of international and national reports, PISA has created a variety of explicit and implicit narratives for steering national educational policy processes. pp. 172–191

Keywords: PISA; OECD; curriculum; educational narratives