This technical report and user's guide is designed to provide researchers with an overview of the design and implementation of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), as well as with information on how to access the PISA 2009 data. This information is meant to supplement that presented in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publications by describing those aspects of PISA 2009 that are unique to the United States. Chapter 2 provides information about sampling requirements and sampling in the United States. Chapter 3 describes participation rates at the school and student level. Chapter 4 describes the details of how schools and students were recruited, while Chapter 5 provides information on instrument development. Chapter 6 describes field operations used for collecting data, while Chapter 7 provides detail concerning various aspects of data management. Chapter 8 describes international activities related to data processing, scaling, and weighting. Chapter 9 describes the data available from both international and U.S. sources, while Chapter 10 discusses some special issues involved in analyzing the PISA 2009 data. Appended are: (1) Comparison of the PISA 2009 and NAEP 2009 Reading Assessments; (2) School Recruitment Materials; (3) Student and Parent Materials; (4) PISA 2009 U.S. Student Questionnaire and School Questionnaire; (5) Data Collection Training Agenda; (6) Item Reliabilities; (7) Explanation of Indices (abstracted from OECD 2010c and OECD 2010d); and (8) PISA 2009 Nonresponse Bias Analysis Report. Individual chapters contain footnotes. (Contains 65 tables, 1 figure and 6 exhibits.)