International Educational Assessment as a Device for the Circulation of Knowledge and Global Governmentality

• In Event: Travelling Knowledge (I): Concepts, Practices and Institutions

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the application of international tests, evaluating the educational performance achieved by the countries, in a comparative perspective, has increased. Behind their production, there is a complex network, in which international organizations such as IEA, OECD, World Bank and Unesco are articulated with state agencies. These international assessments emerged in the late 1960s as a scientific initiative, seeking to "make the world a research laboratory" and have facilitated and promoted hundreds of investigations. This complex network, through which knowledge, data, techniques and normative guidelines circulate, constitutes a governmentality device that governs conducts on a global scale, performing the "educational quality" in the global society.

Chile is one of the peripheral countries that were incorporated to these evaluations earlier, in 1967. Since then, it has participated in the regional assessment of Unesco, in OECD’s PISA and TALIS, in IEA’s TIMSS, CIVED, SITES, ICCS and ICILS. Only between 1997 and 2017, 21 tests have been applied in the country. The operation of this device has led to the insertion of the country's educational system in an international network of knowledge circulation that has had a marked impact on it: definition of standards, incorporation of new conceptual distinctions, changes in the national evaluation system and the educational curriculum. In the analysis of these processes, scientific-technical reflexivity has prevailed, with little attention to the incidence of the asymmetries of the context in which they take place.

The ongoing investigation is based on interviews and the review of documents and press material.

Authors

• Claudio Ramos Zincke

• Alejandra Falabella, Universidad Alberto Hurtado