A history of educational research in relation to large-scale measurement and the new post-war “kids” on the block: international large-scale assessments

• In Event: Comparative reasoning in the making of competitive educational systems: On international assessments, policy, and society

Proposal

Our starting point in this paper is to state that the creation of international large-scale assessments (ILSA) in the late 1950s implied something new on the education agora (cf. Nowotny, et. al., 2001), forming a specific scientific reasoning (cf. Hacking, 1990) on how to make education intelligible. In this way of understanding education, ILSA developed into the most evident and prominent example of education research making a comparativistic turn. We organize our paper by making examples on how this comparativistic turn was embedded in a thinking with longer historical trajectories, which later came to influence the construction of ILSAs scientific premises and claims, and later on further came to influence policy-making. As such, the paper elaborates on an analytical timeline making the comparativistic turn within education research visible. With this as central to the paper, an elaboration of some of the possibilities and desires within education historically are made, and in this demonstrates how the comparativistic turn came to be thought of as a ‘salvation’ in managing and solving perceived problems, both in education and in society at large. The constructed timeline is then used for illuminating some of the later relations and interactions that move in tandem between science and society demonstrating a basic timeline from research (in our example, ILSA results and recommendations) primarily speaking to society, into later on, when society influenced by the terminology, methods and a comparativistic turn instantiated by the ILSAs started to ‘talk back’ to science (Nowotny, et. al., 2001) making claims on what was perceived as ’suitable’ research.
This is performed historically from how uncertainties through science was transformed into certainties about education within firstly, the moral sciences with its preoccupation on probability (see for instance, Daston, 1988; Hacking, 2006), secondly, the psychometric ideal with its preoccupation on validity and reliability of tests measuring individuals memory (cf. Danziger, 2008), performances, and the ‘making kinds of people’ (see for instance, Authors, 2018), into, thirdly, a systems thought (cf. Heyck, 2015) way of understanding education and its performances in relation to a cybernetics perspective that conceived all things in terms of organization, structure, system, function and process (cf. Wiener, 1948). These trajectories came in the late 1950s together in the creation of ILSA with a specific notion of considering the world of education as a ‘world laboratory’ (Foshay et. al., 1962) largely based on a chimera of quantifications and comparisons (Authors, 2019). With its notion of a ‘world laboratory’ and its strong desire for providing ‘answers’, ILSA created a specific sphere for interactions with a specific mandate and mission. Therefore, by historicizing on the development of ILSA we are in a position to make retrodiction analysis (von Wright, 1983) of ILSA on the agora (Nowotny, et. al., 2001). In that, we can also demonstrate in what ways ILSA are important for interaction and communication between science and society, and in that becomes important nodes for tandem processes embedding both science and society.

Authors

• Daniel Pettersson, University of Gävle

• Gun-Britt Wärvik, Universitu of Gothenburg