The multiple effects of international large-scale assessment on education policy and research

Abstract

This paper introduces a serendipitous special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, focusing on the rise of large-scale international testing and performance data in school system accountability and the effects that such changes have produced in education policy and research. These developments are theorised in terms of the reworking of the State and networked modes of governance, including the increased involvement of edu-businesses in education policy-making and enactment, and the emergence of new topological spatialities and connectivities associated with globalisation. We contend that the prevalence of international large-scale assessments has greatly enhanced the mutual ‘visibility’ between participating national (and subnational) schooling systems within a commensurate space of measurement, which in turn makes possible new ways of acting in light of ‘evidence-informed’ policy-making. This analysing and theorising serves to both contextualise and introduce the papers included in this special issue. The paper closes by considering the implications of such developments on education policy and research, and how this necessitates the development for a new approach for researchers engaged in policy analysis, now and into the future.

Keywords:

• large-scale assessment
• accountability
• policy
• research
• topology
• edu-businesses
• evidence-informed policy

Acknowledgement

Steven and Bob would like to thank Discourse Associate Editors Greg Thompson and Sam Sellar for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See Thompson and Cook (2012) for an interesting account of the move from what Foucault called ‘disciplinary societies’ to what Deleuze referred to as ‘societies of control’. In their analysis of NAPLAN and the My School website in Australia, they suggest that, with this transition, students ‘become disembodied bytes and bits plotted in various statistical spaces’ (p. 575).

2. See Kitchin (2014) for a fulsome attempt to define ‘big data’.