Local meanings of international student assessments: an analysis of media discourses of PISA in China, 2010-2016

ABSTRACT

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has garnered increasing attention since its inception in 2000. Correspondingly, there has been heightened interest in ‘PISA poster countries’ like Singapore and Shanghai-China. Yet to date, little is known about the processes and dynamics of the construction of PISA discourses within these ‘poster countries’. This paper examines the Chinese print media’s reception and interpretation of PISA. Using content analysis of media reportage in 2010, 2013 and 2016, the paper identifies core patterns and themes within the media-generated PISA discourses in China and traces changes in the media discourses over time. The findings shed light on a ‘mediatisation’ process where the Chinese media’s interpretation of PISA gets shaped by culture-specific factors such as dominant political ideology, national aspirations, and histories. As such, PISA has acquired localised meanings in China and serves as an instrument to promote national development agenda and justify education reforms.

KEYWORDS:

• International large-scale assessments (ILSAs)
• PISA
• media
• China
• OECD

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. One telling example of the increasing interest in education systems from the East is the UK’s active borrowing of the ‘mathematics mastery’ teaching approach from Shanghai marked by the distinguishing feature of ‘whole-class interactive teaching methods’ – a 41-million-pound initiative was put in place to promote ‘mastery’ approach to teaching mathematics in around 8,000 primary schools across the UK between 2016 and 2020, following such efforts as China–England mathematics teacher exchange program and importation of Shanghai mathematics textbooks & practice books into the UK (UK Department of Education, 2016). Retrieved from: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/south-asian-method-of-teaching-maths-to-be-rolled-out-in-schools.

2. PISA, for instance, was first conducted in 2000 by the OECD with the explicit purpose of collecting comparable data from its Member States (OECD 2000).

3. The category of ‘newly industrializing country’ (NIC) has been increasingly used by political scientists and economists to describe a subset of traditionally defined developing countries that have not yet reached developed country status by conventional standards of high income and high human development, but generally enjoy fast economic growth rates and experience rapid industrialisation within their territories (O’Neil 2010). China has been consistently considered as NIC by various authors – see e.g. Bozyk 2006; Mankiw 2007.

4. All these four regions are located along the Eastern coast of China with GDP per capita of over 10,000 US dollars and are considered more economically developed regions in China (National Bureau of Statistics 2018). Given the current increasing decentralisation of educational funding in China, these regions generally enjoy a high level of autonomy in education decision-making in their local areas – e.g. all of them have their own versions of college entrance examinations, as opposed to the National Version used by the majority (20) of the total 34 provincial-level administrative units across China.

5. There may also be low interest amongst the public in issues like PISA and PISA-related reports. As ILSAs measures gain more policy salience – e.g. get transformed into educational accountability measures or incorporated into education reform initiatives – ILSAs have garnered more attention from education professionals, decision-makers and education researchers, yet the interest of the public (excluding these above groups) in ILSAs warrants more investigation. I thank the anonymous reviewers for making this important point and other suggestions throughout this paper.

6. Baidu is the dominant search engine in China, oftentimes considered as the equivalent to Google in the US.

7. Translation was done by the author where necessary – e.g. quotation from speakers; headlines.

8. Translation was done by the independent researcher who was not provided the author’s own translation. These two sets of translations/coding were then carefully compared. As indicated, there was, in general, a high level of similarity between these two sets of coding/translations.

9. Given the many issues with the concept of ‘neutrality’ or ‘objectivity’ of the media, I want to further explain the use of the code ‘neutral’ here. To clarify, ‘neutral’ is used here to represent the type of ILSAs-reportage that tends to be limited and technical, and is used to distinguish between the other two typical responses to ILSAs results – glorifying/positive and scandalising/negative (Steiner-Khamsi 2003). In general, ‘neutral’ reportage tends to focus on technical details of ILSAs while minimising the discussions of the meanings or implications of the ILSAs results for the home country.

10. Translation was done by the author. The original headlines in Chinese are – positive-toned: ‘Dongya Jie Xueba, Shanghai Xuesheng Zui Qiang’; for the negative-toned ‘Laoshi Rang Dusha Jiu Dusha Daozhi Dutu Nengli Ruo’; for the neutral-toned ‘Quanqiu Zhongxuesheng Kexue Jiaoyu Toushi’.

11. While one can reasonably argue that Shanghai, being one of the most developed regions in China, cannot represent China as a whole, it is important to bear in mind that Shanghai has long served as a pilot testing ground for national educational reforms. One useful example was how the basic education curriculum reform was first piloted in Shanghai in the early 2000s before it was rolled out to the rest of the country. Accordingly, the performances of Shanghai in multiple educational aspects (e.g. resource distribution efficiency, student learning outcomes) usually serve as important indicators and attainable targets for reforms and policies in other regions.

12. A proportion of the students in Shanghai are sampled to take learning assessments of Chinese Language and Mathematics, fill out questionnaires on civics and ethics and other topics, and are further tested for physical health. Sampled teachers and principals are asked to fill out surveys with questions on various aspects of student learning, teaching, and educational institutions.

13. A manual review of front-page headlines of the majority of the newspapers in the dataset during the designated data collection period was performed; most of the news items were ‘regular’ news items (as opposed to ‘explosive’ or ‘sensational’ news). Most of these front-page news items were different across newspapers too, suggesting that there were no other significantly more newsworthy items at the national level that have ‘crowded out’ the reportage on PISA.

14. E.g. Tom Loveless (2013) questions the adequacy of Shanghai’ PISA sampling frame in representing the entire municipality – see ‘PISA’s China Problem’, accessed from: https://www.brookings.edu/research/pisas-china-problem/.