Contributing to the common good? Media coverage of the international largescale assessment of adult skills (PIAAC) in four national contexts (original) (raw)
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This paper focuses on the rapidly expanding field of international assessment surveys and their impact on the field of adult education and learning. It is part of a developing programme of research into the politics and modes of representation in large-scale assessments. I take the case of OECD's PIAAC survey as the survey most immediately relevant to the aims of this conference and situate it within the wider context of the datification of educational policy and practice. The claims made for the benefits of surveys like PIAAC are far-reaching and resonate with ideas of growth and equity. Hannushek and Woessmann (2015) claim that improving the basic skills of adults will lead to " remarkable overall economic gains while providing for broad participation in the benefits of development and facilitating poverty reduction, social and civic participation, health improvement, and gender equity ". Using documentary data collected from the OECDs publicity materials and media coverage of the second round PIAAC survey findings in June 2016, I examine how far the intentions outlined above were translated into national media and policy discourse in four of the nine countries that took part: Singapore, Greece, New Zealand and Slovenia. I discuss how these discourses were managed by the OECD and national actors I use a sociomaterial approach which treats international surveys and the " centres of calculation " (Latour, 2005) that lie behind them as innovative technologies which seek to enrol national actors in order to consolidate and naturalise particular ways of understanding and working with adult education and learning policy. The data highlight the complex trajectories taken by the survey findings through print and digital media as they are framed and interpreted through existing public debates The paper concludes that international assessments do not serve the goals of growth and equity in any straightforward way, since a) the underlying assumptions of the comparative tests subvert these goals and b) many conflicting interests and priorities intervene to create a mismatch between the testers' intentions and policy outcomes.
Changing times, changing needs: enhancing the utility of international large-scale assessments
Large-scale Assessments in Education, 2020
Mounting concerns about the levels and distributions of human capital, as well as how they are associated with outcomes for individuals and societies, have contributed to an increase in the number of national and international surveys. These surveys not only examine skills among school-age and adult populations, they also facilitate evaluation of the relationships among these skills and various background factors. At this juncture, the main ILSAs are making the transition to becoming fully digitally based assessments (DBAs). With the transition rapidly progressing, this is a propitious moment to consider the history of large-scale national and international assessments and to reflect on both what has contributed to their increased salience and growth, and how best to enhance their constructive impact on both policy and policy research in the future. We argue this can be done by utilizing a comprehensive, multidimensional framework that establishes a set of design criteria against wh...
Research in Comparative and International Education
The ‘Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies’ (PIAAC), developed and managed by the OECD, is an important source of knowledge about adult skills as well as an intervention in the field of education policy. One level of the intervention is the presence of PIAAC results in public media and debate. This article presents a comparative analysis of the way major newspapers in Italy and Denmark presented and used PIAAC over the period 2013–2019. The press contributes to constructing knowledge and setting agendas for education by presenting information structured from criteria of news value and from ideological stances. The analysis, done as part of the ENLIVEN research project ( Milana et al., 2020 ), traces how PIAAC results were covered in Italian and Danish newspapers and used in the construction of themes, angles and ‘truths’ on skills and adult learning.
The Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) is expanding internationally and reaching countries that seemed to be immune to this education reform approach until quite recently. Accordingly, more and more educational systems in the world are articulated around three main policy principles: accountability, standards and decentralisation. National large-scale assessments (NLSAs) are a core component of the GERM; these assessments are increasingly used for accountability purposes as well as to ensure that schools achieve and promote centrally defined and evaluable learning standards. In this paper, we explore these trends on the basis of a new and original database on NLSAs, as well as on data coming from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) questionnaires. In the paper we also discuss how different theories on policy dissemination/globalisation explain the international spread of NLSAs and test-based accountability worldwide, and reflect on the potential of a political sociology approach to analyse this globalising phenomenon.