Full Description
This book explores the often controversial international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) in education and offers research-based accounts of international testing as a social practice. Assessment exercises, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), produce comparable international statistics and rankings on educational performance, and are influential practices that shape educational policy on a global scale. The chapters in this volume, written by expert researchers in the field, take the reader behind the scenes to document a broad range of ILSA practices - from the recruitment of countries into ILSAs, to the production and performance of large-scale testing, and the management, media reception and use of test data. Based on data that is only available to expert researchers with inside access, the international case study material includes examples from Australia, Ecuador, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Scotland, Slovenia, Sweden, the UK and the USA. The volume provides important insights for teachers, researchers and policy-makers who use and study assessment data and who wish to evaluate its significance for educational policy and practice.
Contents
Foreword, Bruno D. Zumbo
Introduction, Bryan Maddox
Part I: Theory and Method
1. Researching Inside the International Testing Machine: Pisa Parties, Midnight Emails and Red Shoes, Camilla Addey
2. Assessment Imaginaries: Methodological Challenges of Future Assessment Machines, Ben Williamson
3 The Infrastructures of Objectivity in Standardized Testing, Nelli Piattoeva and Antti Saari
4 Detecting Student Performance in Large-Scale Assessments, Margareta Serder
Part II: Observing Data Production
5 Starting Strong: On the Genesis of The New OECD Survey On Early Childhood Education and Care, Simone Bloem
6. The Situation(S) of Text in PISA Reading Literacy, Jeanne Marie Ryan
7. Self-Reported Effort and Motivation in the PISA Test, Hanna Eklöf and Therese N. Hopfenbeck
8. Student Preparation for Large-Scale Assessments: A Comparative Analysis, Sam Sellar, Bob Lingard, David Rutkowski and Keita Takayama
9 Investigating Testing Situations, Bryan Maddox, Francois Keslair and Petra Javrh
Part III: Reception and Public Opinion
10. Managing Public Reception of Assessment Results, Mary Hamilton
11. The Public and International Assessments, Oren Pizmony-Levy, Linh Doan, Jonathan Carmona and Erika Kessler
12 Post Script: Has Critique Begun to Gather Steam Again? Beyond 'Critical Barbarism' in Studying Ilsas, Radhika Gorur
Index
