Are students well prepared to meet the challenges of the future? Are they able to analyse, reason and communicate their ideas effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? These are the questions that the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) aims to answer through three-yearly surveys of 15- year-olds in the principal industrialised countries that examine student performance in reading, mathematical and scientific literacy. The first survey, in 2000, focused on reading and the second, in 2003, on mathematics. PISA 2006, with its focus on science, completes the first full cycle of the survey. Assessing Scientific, Reading and Mathematical Literacy: A Framework for PISA 2006 presents the conceptual framework underlying the PISA 2006 survey. It includes a re- developed and expanded framework for scientific literacy, an innovative component on the assessment of students' attitudes to science and the frameworks for the assessment of reading and mathematics. Within each domain, the framework defines the content that students need to acquire, the processes that need to be performed, and the contexts in which knowledge and skills are applied. The domains and their aspects are also illustrated with sample tasks.