Visibility, invisibility, and visualisation: the danger of school performance data

Abstract

The research reports how a particular school reform initiative – ‘Project 600’ – constituted students in one school region Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon topological understandings of power and recent work on the visualisation of data in education, as well as the insights of key staff involved in the project, we reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which so-called ‘invisible’ (i.e., ‘average-performing’) students were made ‘visible’ through data. On the one hand, Project 600 enabled teachers to see these students as learners and beyond broader pressures to enhance results on standardised testing (i.e., beyond data). However, associated processes of datafication meant that these students’ ‘visibility’ as holistic learners was simultaneously challenged, as their schools and region came to be increasingly governed through data. These students were then at risk of becoming ‘invisible’ in a different sense, as processes of commensuration and visualisation of data contributed to them being constituted as data.

Keywords:

• Data
• visualisation
• topology of power
• commensuration
• NAPLAN
• teacher learning