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ABSTRACT
‘Global Competence’ (GC) is currently being visualized by international and national bodies as an education imperative. Not only has GC become ubiquitous as a policy idea, it is, in 2018, being assessed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA has quantified the multifaceted concept of GC into a series of measurable and comparable constructs. Using concepts from (Science and Technology Studies) STS, the aim of this paper is to explore how a selection of students in Victoria understand and respond to the assessment of global competence in PISA 2018. The methodology of ‘survey encounters’ was employed to elicit students’ thinking as they encountered the questions on the survey. While the PISA survey was developed to test the students, the methodology of ‘survey encounters’ also provided an opportunity for the students to test the PISA survey.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Jill Blackmore and Associate Professor Radhika Gorur for their many helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for their help with improving this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Interchangeably used with other terms including 21st century skills and soft skills.
2 Several terms first appear in quotations in order to identify them as contested.
3 ILSAs include both international LSAs ‘involving multiple countries from different regions’ and regional LSAs ‘involving a group of countries from a single geographic region’ (Kamens & Benavot, Citation2011, p. 288).
4 The age of PISA sample.
5 Pseudonyms have been used for schools and students. All students from Chilton have names starting with C and from Malory with M.