The OECD’s ‘Well-being 2030’ agenda: how PISA's affective turn gets lost in translation

ABSTRACT

Well-being 2030 has become the latest rationale for the OECD’s education work. This vision has given rise to new assessments of student well-being beginning with PISA 2015. The OECD, recognising the problems of PISA 2015, conceptualised a wider student well-being construct in PISA 2018, and attempted to measure ‘students’ feelings’. However, analyses of the OECD’s affective turn reveal major problems remain. Our critique is empirically underpinned by an innovative analytical strategy: comparing PISA 2018 student questionnaire translations across different ‘economies’ that use the same written language (China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan). Our analyses confirm that the OECD imagines a cultural and context-free world, one in which translation and measurements are simply technical problems to be engineered, rather than deeper ‘problems’ of worldviews that require attunement. To encourage the OECD to recognise these differences in its future assessments, we offer starting points from recent research in cultural psychology.

摘要

“福祉2030”已成为经合组织教育工作的最新理念。这一理念催生了自PISA 2015起新的学生福祉测评。认识到此项测评中的问题后，经合组织在PISA 2018中提出更宽泛的学生福祉概念，并尝试测量“学生的情感”。然而，对经合组织情感转向的分析表明，主要问题依然存在。我们的批评以一种创新性的分析策略为实证基础，即对使用相同书面语言的不同“经济体”（中国大陆、香港、澳门和台湾）的PISA 2018学生问卷翻译进行比较分析。我们的分析证实，经合组织设想了一个无关文化和语境的世界，其中，翻译和测量仅仅是需要被设计的技术问题，而不是需调整的更深层次的世界观“问题”。为鼓励经合组织在未来的测评中认识到这些差异，我们从文化心理学的最新研究中提供一些启示。

KEYWORDS:

• Well-being
• emotion
• culture
• East Asia
• China
• Taiwan
• Hong Kong
• Japan
• affect-based pedagogy
• OECD Learning Compass 2030

关键词:

• 福祉
• 情感
• 文化
• 东亚
• 中国
• 台湾
• 香港
• 日本
• 情感教学法
• 经合组织学习指南2030

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend thanks to You Yun (East China Normal University) who helped us further understand linguistic nuance in Chinese and contributed to our thinking on these themes. Her recent work is highly complementary, and helps theorize the differences obfuscated by the recent OECD affective turn (see You, 2022; You, Forthcoming).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We capitalise the term Other throughout the current piece to signify that which manifests an alternative worldview. That is, Other indicates something not fully visible from within a given cultural horizon. This is opposed to rendering the term ‘other’ in non-capitalised form, which would signify a difference within an already known horizon.

2 We acknowledge that small differences exist in slang, cultural references, political language, and other domains, but none of these would impact the findings on affect reported here.

3 Some readers might wonder if Differential Item Function (DIF) could detect these differences (see Takayama 2018). But DIF doesn’t pick up translation issues that are our focus here, and could not be applied to descriptive Likert indices asking students to describe their frequency of being ‘happy’ (always, sometimes, rarely, and never).

4 Although recent studies such as Bencharit et al., 2018 complicate the picture to some extent, showing changes in recent years. That European and European-Americans are showing increased preference for LAP states is another reason the OECD should sample those emotions.

5 As such, the philosophical resources for developing an alternative form of well-being from the Chinese and/or East Asia context are abundant (You 2022). Indeed, emotions are so central to East Asian philosophy, that many consider emotion as ontological, particular in Neo-Confucian China (see Marks and Ames, 1994; Chen, 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeremy Rappleye

Jeremy Rappleye is Professor at the University of Hong Kong, having spent the past 12 years at Kyoto University. He spent 2021–2022 at Stanford University working with Hazel Markus and other leading cultural psychologists there.

Hikaru Komatsu

Hikaru Komatsu is Associate Professor at National Taiwan University. After spending more than 15 years in environmental science, he realised the importance of culture for achieving sustainability. He is currently examining how culture is related to sustainability and how culture can be rearticulated for sustainability through education.

Yukiko Uchida

Yukiko Uchida is Professor at Kyoto University, Institute for the Future of Human Society. From 2019-2020, she was a Fellow at Stanford University, CASBS. Upon receiving her PhD in social psychology from Kyoto University in 2003, she started her academic career as a visiting researcher at the University of Michigan and Stanford University.

Jeanne Tsai

Jeanne L. Tsai is Professor and Vice Chair of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Culture and Emotion Lab. Her research examines the cultural shaping of emotion and its implications for communication, health, decision-making, person perception, and resource sharing in a variety of applied settings.

Hazel Markus

Hazel Markus is Professor at Stanford University and co-Director of the new ‘do tank’ called Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions (SPARQ).