Comparative Examination of Media Discourses on PISA in China, India, and Germany

• In Event: 63.013 - Educational Facts in the Making? International Large-Scale Assessments in Research, Mass Media, and Policy Discourses

Abstract

International student assessment programs appeal to nations as a seemingly universal and context-free measures of educational improvement. Focusing on OECD's PISA, the paper examines media (press) reporting in China, India and German to develop comparison analyses of different civic cultures and political regimes in relation to issues of the Agora in transnational governance and globalization. While the tests are mobile, their adoption and reception are highly context-dependent in relation to multiple national/domestic factors.

Focusing primarily on the statements about PISA in the national press media of these countries, the paper’s objectives are epistemological and institutional:

a) How is science constructed in the press as a practice of social change; asking how the statements are narrated as truthful, and how are numbers and inscription devices (charts, graphs, ranking lists, etc.) used in the reporting;
(b) How do the press relate measurements as with socio-cultural importance; such as how the seeming objectivity of numbers is made as affective devices to bring forth values of patriotism, national development and/or educational improvement;
(c) What are the logics of comparisons; that is, what gets compared and what are the principles of “comparativeness” that give intelligibility to differences.
d) How “stakeholders” in the debates get constructed; such as which socio-political actors get to lend their voices through the media, and on whose behalf do they claim to speak.

We argue that comparisons the media accepts the international assessments as telling the truth about difference cross-nationally but re-narrated in relation to cultural and political discourses about the nation, development and “need”. The media statements use the ranking and statistical measure of equivalence to think about differences. These differences reported in press are not only about the generalize characteristic of the nation but also about populations and their differences.

But they simultaneously produce differences through classifications as threats to that hope of national progress, such as differences in the categorical distinctions as focus on public and policy attention in India and China. In China, the press communication on PISA showed straightforward and close relationships between the Chinese government and PISA. Social webs, in contrast, reflected indifferent attitude from the wider public in a few posts. In India, the communicative pattern revealed the government's ambivalent relationship towards PISA. Selective English-language press reports reflected opinions largely in favor of the test by various non-state actors with widely different rationales, after India's one-time PISA-participation in 2010 and the Indian government's abrupt decision to withdraw from it. The media response on PISA In Germany was critical but used by policy actors to frame their own interest by shaping public opinion.

To understand the relations of politics and power, the paper uses the methodological lens of the “systems of reason”; that is, the rules and standards by which distinctions about people, nations and science are produced in mediatized discourses.

Authors

• Sarbani Chakraborty, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Jingying Feng, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Anders Lindqvist, University of Gothenburg, Department of Education and Special Education