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1.
This paper examines whether, to what extent, and how international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) have influenced education policy-making at the national level. Based on an exploratory review of the research and policy literature on ILSAs and two surveys administered to educational policy experts, researchers, policymakers, and educators, our research found that ILSAs, with their multiple and ambiguous uses, increasingly function as solutions in search for the right problem – that is, they appear to be used as tools to legitimize educational reforms. The survey results pointed to a growing perception among stakeholders that ILSAs are having an effect on national educational policies, with 38% of respondents stating that ILSAs were generally misused in national policy contexts. However, while the ILSA literature indicates that these assessments are having some influence, there is little evidence that any positive or negative causal relationship exists between ILSA participation and the implementation of education reforms. Perhaps the most significant change associated with the use of ILSAs in the literature reviewed is the way in which new conditions for educational comparison have been made possible at the national, regional, and global levels.  相似文献   

2.
Abstract

This article focuses on the growing development towards new forms of ‘distributed’ governance within current large-scale educational reforms. The emphasis is on so-called ‘governance through standards’ as a transformative reform complex which manifests itself in a simultaneous process of regulative destabilisation and (global) reconstruction of policy control. This newly emerging regulative policy ‘ensemble’ is found to be directly related to the growing collaborative activity of cross-field networks between governmental, non-governmental and private actors. Empirically, this article refers to the so-called Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative which has fundamentally reshaped US education policy since 2001. The initiative comprised the negotiation, implementation and controlling of supra-state core skill standards for K-12 education as the benchmark for other regulating instruments such as assessments, monitoring and teacher training. In the context of the CCSS, the aforementioned new structures of regulation can then be located within an entrepreneurial alliance around the non-profit organisation Achieve, Inc. Through its function as a core policy network manager, Achieve generated simultaneous practices of collaboration and distinction, discourse initiation and (invisible) norm stabilisation.  相似文献   

3.
Abstract

This article analyses international large-scale assessments in education from a temporal perspective. The article discusses and compares the different conceptions of time in the early international assessments conducted in the 1960s and 1970s by the IEA with the PISA studies conducted by the OECD from the year 2000 onwards. The paper argues that there has been a shift in the ways that the assessments structure time. The early IEA surveys were characterized by a relative slowness, lack of synchronization and lack of trend analyses. PISA, by contrast, is characterized by high pace, simultaneous publication of results around the world and regular and recurrent studies making the analysis of trends possible. The emergence of this new time regime, it is argued, has implications for how education is governed. At the transnational level, it strengthens the influence and importance of OECD as a significant policy actor. At the national level, as educational discourse and policy adapts to the temporalities of the PISA calendar, two kinds of effects can be distinguished. First, there is a tendency towards searching for “retrotopian” solutions for contemporary problems. Second, there is a tendency towards acceleration and short-term planning when it comes to educational reforms.  相似文献   

4.
The global popularity of test-based accountability appears to signal political trust in standardised assessments as valid and relevant measures of education quality. Nonetheless, research shows that educators' perceptions of standardised testing and test-based accountability can vary significantly, as do their responses to accountability demands. Considering the key influence of teachers' beliefs on the way in which they respond to education reforms, in this article we examine teachers' beliefs and opinions about standardised tests and test-based accountability. We analyse a comparative study on interpretations and experiences of standardised testing and test-based accountability demands of compulsory education teachers in Chile and Norway. These cases were selected following a most-different-systems design approach. The data was derived from an electronic survey (n = 2,531) and in-depth interviews (n = 41). The analysis shows how in both contexts, teachers are relatively critical about the validity, usefulness and fairness of standardised tests. This indicates lacking teacher trust in standardised testing and test-based accountability. Still, despite similar trends, some key differences in the beliefs of Chilean and Norwegian teachers are found, which highlight the influence of the sociocultural context in shaping teachers' beliefs. By illuminating how teachers in different contexts make sense of test-based accountability, our analysis contributes to the understanding of why the often-reported mismatch between policy expectations and policy outcomes might occur.  相似文献   

5.
Abstract

Background: International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) are a much-debated phenomenon in education. Increasingly, their outcomes attract considerable media attention and influence educational policies in many jurisdictions worldwide. The relevance, uses and consequences of these assessments are often the focus of research scrutiny. Whilst some argue that the assessment outcomes provide an effective basis for informed policy-making, critics claim that the use of international assessment data can result in a range of unintended consequences, such as the shaping and governing of school systems ‘by numbers’.

Purpose: This article explores and analyses the arguments about the uses and consequences of ILSAs. In particular, the discourse about the assessments’ consequential validity will be discussed and evaluated.

Sources of evidence: Literature relating to the uses and consequences of large-scale assessment was analysed, with a focus on research on the consequential aspects of validity.

Main argument: Much research suggests that ILSAs have unintended consequences that affect and influence educational policy. However, the influences on educational policy are complex and interwoven: for example, it is not clear-cut whether effects such as converging curricular are, necessarily, direct consequences of large-scale assessments. Further, it is suggested that a beneficial consequence of large-scale assessment is the infrastructure they provide for studies in the social sciences, although caution must be applied to causal claims, in particular because of the cross-sectional design of the assessments.

Conclusions: The considerable literature discussing the uses and consequences of large-scale assessments tends to point out potential negative aspects of the studies. However, it is also apparent that large-scale international assessments can be a valuable resource for studying global trends and evolving systems in education. Despite the extensive debates around large-scale assessment outcomes both in the media and in educational policy arenas, empirical educational research all too often appears underused in the discussion.  相似文献   

6.
Abstract

Since devolution in the late 1990s, education policy in England has diverged further from that in Scotland and also from policy in Wales and Northern Ireland. In this paper we review the roots and trajectory of the English education reforms over the past two decades. Our focus is the schools sector, though we also touch on adjoining reforms to early years and further and higher education. In so doing, we engage with various themes, including marketisation, institutional autonomy and accountability. Changes in governance arrangements for schools have been a defining feature of education reforms since devolution. This has been set against an evolution in national performance indicators that has put government priorities into ever sharper relief. In theorising the changes, we pay particular attention to the suggestion that the English education system now epitomises the concept of ‘network governance’, which has also been applied to education in a global context. We question the extent to which policies have in practice moved beyond the well-established mechanisms of ‘steering at a distance’ and undermined the very notion of an education system in England. We conclude by considering possible futures for education policy and how they may position England in relation to other parts of the UK and the wider world.  相似文献   

7.
This article presents recent reform processes in Japanese higher education, concerning the tensions emerging within the system regarding ‘excellence’ and ‘diversity’. The article particularly focuses on how Japanese universities have reacted to the recent ‘competition’ and ‘differentiation’ policy promoted by the government, drawing on recent survey results conducted with academic managers at Japanese universities. It is interesting to examine the case of Japan, a historically diversified and differentiated national system, which has been changing rapidly with recent national ‘top-down’ policy reforms, followed by more recent and new bottom-up institutional initiatives. The study shows that universities are trying to achieve excellence, fulfilling different functions at the same time, aspiring to be excellent in teaching, research and social contribution without having institutional capacity to meet these expectations. Appropriate internal governance and external mediation mechanisms need to be created at the institutional level to manage diversification of the higher education system as a whole.  相似文献   

8.
ABSTRACT

This paper examines how international, large-scale skills assessments (ILSAs) engage with the broader societies they seek to serve and improve. It looks particularly at the discursive work that is done by different interest groups and the media through which the findings become part of public conversations and are translated into usable form in policy arenas. The paper discusses how individual countries are mobilised to participate in international surveys, how the public release of findings is managed and what is known from current research about how the findings are reported and interpreted in the media. Research in this area shows that international and national actors engage actively and strategically with ILSAs, to influence the interpretation of findings and subsequent policy outcomes. However, these efforts are indeterminate and this paper argues that it is at the more profound level of the public imagination of education outcomes and of the evidence needed to know about these that ILSAs achieve their most totalising effects.  相似文献   

9.
This article presents findings from a recent study of the education policy uses and impact of international large-scale assessments, namely the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The paper focuses on two overlapping dimensions of PISA’s education policy use in the context of Spain. These include political dimensions, such as the use of PISA to initiate and justify the 2012?2013 educational reforms; and technical dimensions, namely the use of PISA in the development of national-level indicators used to benchmark progress and guide education and curriculum reform. The study points to the growing dominance of PISA as a powerful policy tool. Findings from the paper add to the body of literature on the different ways in which international assessments are used to guide education policy within national spaces and the role of the OECD as an agent of transnational policy steering.  相似文献   

10.
The goal of this work is to better understand the institutional changes in the educational systems of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We demonstrate that the educational reforms implemented during the transformation introduced very different institutional arrangements in the four countries, despite the fact that their systems shared many common characteristics at the beginning of the 1990s. Differences between the national approaches to educational reforms are particularly reflected in the modes of education decentralisation, the level of school autonomy, accountability and funding mechanisms. We believe that different institutional arrangements may have contributed to the divergent achievements of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland in the PISA programme.  相似文献   

11.
ABSTRACT

The EU has embraced the use of indicators as policy instruments for achieving common aims. One of the indicators, ‘early school leaver’ (ESL), depicts the proportion of young people leaving education and training prematurely. Initially defined as an education policy indicator, it has been transformed into a performance indicator measuring the targets of the current Europe 2020 strategy. In this article, we examine how the indicator works as a policy instrument at different levels of governance applying the conceptual tools provided by the policy instrumentation approach to unpack the components, pinpoint the political effects, and reveal the power relations they produce. Thus challenging the taken-for-grantedness of comparison as a way of knowing we have intended to shift the focus of discussion concerning the role of large-scale comparisons in education towards more productive directions: moving from problematisation and deconstruction of comparison to engaging with processes of measurement.  相似文献   

12.
ABSTRACT

Low completion rate in upper secondary education is seen as a big problem in the Nordic countries. School failure has shown to dramatically increase the risks for unemployment and labour market exclusion with severe consequences for both society and the young person. This paper analyses national policy measures to combat low upper secondary education completion rates in Norway and Sweden, often regarded as representing a social democratic welfare model and a universalistic transition regime. The analysis demonstrates that although this issue has received extensive political attention, the two countries display somewhat different policy designs. The Norwegian approach is proactive and targeted while the Swedish policy is more general and directed towards reforming organisational structures in upper-secondary education. In sum, our analysis demonstrates that national governance structures shape and influence policy design in the context of an increasingly diversified Nordic social democratic welfare state regime.  相似文献   

13.
Abstract

This study problematizes the global educational governance of OECD PISA and its statistical data as a governing technology in contemporary discourses of education reforms. The study examines principles that order the discourses and practices of the international comparative assessment. The effort of analysing the impact of an education reform regime led by OECD PISA reveals how statistical reasoning defines problems in educational systems and forms social discourse surrounding educational reform to solve such problems. In doing so, this article focuses on standardization, classification, and normalization for measuring and comparing student achievement and national effectiveness. The study also offers an alternative way of considering the politics of inclusion and exclusion embedded in practices of education reforms propelled by the international comparative assessment.  相似文献   

14.
《牛津教育评论》2013,39(3-4):407-419

This paper discusses significant examples of the impact of research studies on practice and policy in educational assessment. The discussion focuses on selected issues in three main areas, concerned respectively with formative assessment, with high-stakes summative tests, and with assessment in large-scale surveys. It is concluded that the effects of research have been uneven and weak, in part because of lack of co-ordination of studies and of any one strong institutional centre. However, researchers are also faced with the difficult task of changing the understanding of assessment issues, both amongst the general public and amongst policy makers.  相似文献   

15.
This article argues that the stance toward global regulatory initiatives is influenced by the extent to which these regulatory initiatives threaten the comparative institutional advantages of the national economy. The cases through which this proposition is examined are the showpieces of Germany and Ontario: their system of vocational education and training. The article draws on the Varieties of Capitalism literature to explore the factors that implicated the most into the educational reforms introduced in Germany in the context of the Bologna Process. In the case of Ontario, the paper used educational reforms in the context of two OECD reports, Learning for Job and A Skills beyond School. The paper concludes that comparative institutional advantage and the institutional complementarity sustaining it explain the different trajectories countries take in their response to global pressures.  相似文献   

16.
Education 2030, the new global agenda for educational development, emphasises inclusion and learning outcomes. The top-down programme-based approach, a mainstay of international aid, has up to now failed in helping developing countries to meet these objectives because it tends to overlook where the link is broken between policy implementation from the ‘top’ and results ‘on the ground’. Conversely, those on the ground tackling the learning more directly do not seem to have sufficient capacity to use their experiences to inform institutional and systemic reforms, from the bottom up, as it were. The link between policy, its implementation and the results on the ground could be established through strengthened dialogue between these two approaches. Tapping into the existing knowledge and experience on teaching and learning while at the same time addressing institutional and systemic concerns would be instrumental in facilitating interaction between these two facets of international aid.  相似文献   

17.
This paper introduces a serendipitous special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, focusing on the rise of large-scale international testing and performance data in school system accountability and the effects that such changes have produced in education policy and research. These developments are theorised in terms of the reworking of the State and networked modes of governance, including the increased involvement of edu-businesses in education policy-making and enactment, and the emergence of new topological spatialities and connectivities associated with globalisation. We contend that the prevalence of international large-scale assessments has greatly enhanced the mutual ‘visibility’ between participating national (and subnational) schooling systems within a commensurate space of measurement, which in turn makes possible new ways of acting in light of ‘evidence-informed’ policy-making. This analysing and theorising serves to both contextualise and introduce the papers included in this special issue. The paper closes by considering the implications of such developments on education policy and research, and how this necessitates the development for a new approach for researchers engaged in policy analysis, now and into the future.  相似文献   

18.
ABSTRACT

This paper examines selected reform efforts in technical and technological education from a comparative perspective. The similarities and differences between reforms in selected countries – Brazil, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sweden – are analysed to determine major world‐wide trends. Lessons are drawn which should be useful for nations contemplating reform of their education and training systems. Particular attention is focussed on the time taken to complete reforms effectively and the need for long‐term approaches, relationships between educational reforms and industrial development, the interdependence of reforms affecting general, technical and vocational education, regional co‐operation and the decentralisation of national decision‐making.  相似文献   

19.
ABSTRACT

Assessment is a major component of education, significant in directing what is identified as valued student learning. This paper is framed within an understanding of imperative and exhortative policy. Two paradigmatically different, and potentially contesting, assessment policy directions in Australian education – educational accountability to monitor school and teacher performance, and teacher assessment practices to improve learning (assessment for learning [AfL] or formative assessment) – are examined for their impact on teacher professionalism. Both approaches have official endorsement in Australian policy. Mandated participation in national tests is indicative of educational accountability assessments under national direction. While also endorsed nationally, AfL implementation is reliant on state and territory direction. Our examination reveals tensions in the alignment of both policies. This is evident in the impact of accountability assessment on AfL implementation, in particular, teachers’ understandings of valued assessment evidence. We conclude that a paradigmatic shift to support student learning in Australian schools is a policy imperative that includes the need for professional development and learning support for teachers.  相似文献   

20.
Abstract

Background: Around the globe, education policy borrowing remains pervasive and prevalent. The strategies, interventions and innovations of education systems that perform well, in international assessments, are enthusiastically borrowed and copied in the anticipation of similar educational performance and outcomes.

Purpose: This purpose of the article is to highlight some of the implications and consequences of policy borrowing by comparing the preparation and development programmes for school leaders in various education systems. The article explores the way in which the leadership programmes and models are being adopted and developed by different countries.

Sources of evidence: The article draws upon findings from a contemporary, comparative study of leadership preparation and development across seven different education systems (Seven System Leadership Study). This large-scale, mixed-methods, comparative research study is collecting quantitative and qualitative data about the nature and impact of leadership development and preparation programmes in seven different education systems.

Main argument: The findings from the study reinforce how leadership preparation and development programmes are increasingly becoming standardised as a result of education systems borrowing and adapting from each other. This article also argues that in the contemporary policy discourse, important cultural and contextual influences that significantly affect subsequent implementation and outcomes are increasingly being side-lined and ignored.

Conclusions: This article highlights some of the limitations and unintended consequences of educational policy borrowing. It concludes that adopting some of the design features of effective interventions rather than simply borrowing policies or strategies, in part or in their entirety from very different contexts, may be a more productive way forward.  相似文献   

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