‘Will I learn what I want to learn?’ Usable representations, ‘students’ and OECD assessment production

Abstract

Amid growing debates around international assessment tools in educational policy, few have critically examined how students themselves are cast in policy tool production processes and discourse. Drawing on Stuart Hall's concept of representation, we show how higher education (HE) ‘students’ are constructed, fixed and normalized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) initiative. Based on an analysis of AHELO texts, we argue that the OECD, during the early stages of test production, fixes and circulates the meaning of ‘students’ as represented objects. We identify and analyze two distinct representational practices at work in AHELO texts: classifying and organizing, and marking. We posit that by fixing images of the student as an object of learning and as a consumer–investor subject, the OECD creates ‘usable’ representations of ‘students’ to claim jurisdiction over teaching and learning in HE and to justify intervention through standardized testing.

Keywords:

• students
• representation
• Stuart Hall
• learning outcomes
• international student assessments
• OECD

Notes

1. We want to note that there are limitations to analyzing AHELO and generalizing our findings to all OECD international assessments. AHELO was a feasibility study and was meant to develop a proof of concept. However, due to various issues such as funding, timelines and other OECD member country priorities, the AHELO initiative has not been currently designated as an OECD priority (for more discussions on challenges of developing and implementing AHELO, please see OECD (2012a, 2013a, 2013b; Ewell, 2012). However, despite these limitations, we would argue that international assessment production processes (even potentially failed attempts) are important sites of inquiry to examine representational practices surrounding the question of students. These processes provide a window to knowledge for policy tool production processes that may have occurred in the past (i.e., PISA; see Morgan & Shahjahan, 2014), or may happen in the future.