Educational policy and international large scale assessments in tandem: towards a comparativistic turn

• In Event: Comparative Reasoning in the Making of Competitive Educational Systems: On International Assessments, Policy, and Society

Proposal

The paper discusses theoretical and empirical positions that are organizing research on international assessments as it relates to a science-society agora within a more general framework in international comparative studies.
Our starting point for thinking about the comparativistic turn in education is to focus on a general complex of problems in dealing with interaction between science and society. We are here using an idea developed by Nowotny et al (2003) in the distinction between mode 1 (fundamental research driven by the academy) and mode 2 (problem driven research formulated in societal context). Relations between science and society are metaphorically displayed at an agora (Greek for market or square) with different actors, positions, arguments and resources. Here, Nowotny et al (ibid) take the position that that trajectories in science and society are moving in tandem. However, we are here taking the position that these agora relations are empirical questions, depending on characteristics of the agora and contingent to contextual influences, such as predominant regimes (e.g. Rip, A. 2002) at work in different parts of society.
With this starting point, Paulston’s (2009) review of theories of social and educational change and education reform in comparative research provides one outline from which to think about issues of comparisons . Paulston argues that societies and educational designs differ in their parts and as systems, which open up for discourses on change – and in these discourses are what Fuller (2018) name as “modal power” as a capacity to decide what is and what is not possible. Here, comparisons over space and time is a way to rethink “what is” to “what could be if…”.
From this point of view we turn to Novoa’s & Yariv-Mashal’s (2003) distinction between case and variable studies at work in comparative research discourses over time (see e.g. Suter et al, 2019). In variable studies the history of international large scale assessments is a distinctive field of comparative principles and actors that have formed a predominant position in the past decades in agora of educational policy discourses internationally, based on hierarchizations of students and rankings of educational systems (as in some OECD publications or in McKinsey reports). We name this international development the making of a comparativistic turn. Given this we put forwards two fundamental questions: Which processes were leading to the comparativistic turn? What are the implications of this comparativistic turn for education and for comparative educational research?

Author

• Sverker S:son Lindblad, University of Gothenburg