Rearticulating PISA

ABSTRACT

The OECD’s PISA exercise has by now been widely critiqued. Whilst we agree with most concerns, we begin with the assumption that PISA will remain an enduring and powerful feature of the global educational landscape. Even if the PISA test itself were discontinued, a similar large-scale quantitative assessment exercise would soon arise to take its place. As such, we focus herein on strategies for rearticulating ILSAs such as PISA: the creative use of data to shift the exercise away from dissemination of one dominant worldview towards the recognition of alternatives. To do this, we discuss the approach and findings from our recent papers, and then suggest future directions. Rather than mere accommodation, re-articulation underscores an approach to critique that is generative for theory and practice, one that extends of the horizon of possibility beyond culturally saturated notions of ‘good’ education.

KEYWORDS:

• PISA
• TIMSS
• PIAAC
• critique
• ontology
• self

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In another sense, this piece presents, at least in part, an approach to analysing ILSAs in what Galtung (1981) once described as the “intellectual style” of Japan, one in which it is virtually impossible to understand knowledge as something that is objective, disembodied, and without existential significance. In other words, the pragmatic, embodied, and ontologically punctuated approach we lay out here is also afforded by the cultural context we work within. That said, it is not exclusive, but open to anyone, should they make the effort to learn the “underlying cosmology [that] contains very different visions of how reality is constituted.” (Galtung (1981, 833); see also Rappleye and Komatsu 2017; Rappleye 2020).

2 In a recent paper we have shown that in TIMSS, the gap between Japan and the mean has been approximately one standard deviation in both math and science and for both the 4th and 8th grade levels (Rappleye and Komatsu 2020, Table 1). Critics might argue that we have not accounted for other objective sociological factors in making the claim of a difference basis for achievement, but in fact our recent papers have systematically eliminated most of the major possibilities (for a summary see Komatsu and Rappleye 2020b).