Making Imagination Commensurable: Large-Scale Assessments of Noncognitive Skills

• In Event: 31.033 - Imagination, Imaginaries, and Policy Sociology in Education: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives:
In 2014 The Imagination Institute was launched in the US to develop an ‘imagination quotient’ drawing on the insights of positive psychology. This development parallels growing interest in developing measures and interventions focused on noncognitive factors in education (e.g. a 2014 AERA Presidential Session was dedicated to this topic). ‘Noncognitive’ is used to describe dispositions such as motivation, persistence or sense of purpose that fall outside what is measured as intelligence. Large-scale educational assessments now incorporate noncognitive items and economists are measuring noncognitive factors as alternatives to GDP. Efforts are being made across a number of disciplines to enable the commensurability of dispositions that involve an imagined relation to potential futures and to assess their economic value as ‘skills’. This paper aims to analyse the construction of noncognitive skills as an education policy problem and to understand its emergence through a nexus of psychological, educational and economic research practices.

Theoretical framework:
The paper will work across three theoretical perspectives: (a) science studies literature examining the processes of commensuration and comparison; (b) psychological and economics literature focusing on the measurement of noncognitive factors as part of human capital; and (c) policy sociology in education literature focusing on governance through data and comparison.

Mode of inquiry:
This theoretical paper will draw on philosopher Isabelle Stenger’s notion of an ‘ecology of practices’ to approach the policy problem of noncognitive skills as a social theorist thinking with the practices of psychologists and economists. The paper will draw on experiences conducting research interviews and participating in seminars with psychometricians, economists and policy analysts during a research project examining the development of large-scale assessments in education. The paper will avoid external critique of psychological and economic research to approach the measurement of noncognitive factors from the situation of sharing a stake in the production and usage of educational data.

Substantiated conclusions:
Large-scale educational assessments are evolving to measure noncognitive skills and are helping to construct future-oriented dispositions as (a) a policy problem and (b) a site of programmatic intervention. The measurement of these dispositions involves actualizing imagined futures in the experience of the assessment and in a form that enables commensurability. External critiques of this measurement work tend to emphasis the use of data for new modes of control and can reinforce a moral divide between those who are critical of these policy technologies and those who undertake this technical work. An alternative approach is to consider this technical work from the perspective of the passions that drive it and to pursue a ‘politics of method’ based on sharing a stake in the outcomes of this work. This is a form of internal critique.

Scholarly significance:
The paper will provide a survey of recent developments in large-scale educational assessments focused on future-oriented noncognitive skills. An innovative mode of inquiry will be used to avoid well-worn social theory critiques of the production and effects of data in education and to develop a relational understanding of the practices of psychometricians, economists and policy sociologists.

Author

• Sam Sellar, The University of Queensland