Session Information
23 SES 12 C, International Comparisons
Symposium
Contribution
The interest in large scale comparative studies of students’ assessment has increased considerably during the last decades and the results have been widely spread in Swedish media. Among the different international surveys of students’ assessment PISA is standing out in publicity, meaning that the results have received an extraordinary significance as an assessment of the education system and education policy. In earlier studies of Swedish media reporting on PISA (Pettersson, 2008; Runesdotter et al., 2015), we could observe a precipitous increase dedicated to the Swedish students’ performance. Particularly the deteriorating results in relation to other countries were focused and have contributed to a publicly embraced debate of the critical state of education in Sweden and demands for political measures in order to improve the education. A point of departure for this paper is that media creates certain conditions for how educational results are classified, regulated and communicated in society (Luhmann, 1996), and has thus become a powerful actor in the making of a comparativistic paradigm (Lindblad, Pettersson & Popkewitz, 2015) in education. We consider media as a conglomerate of actors participating in the intersection of science, educational policy, and society, the agora (Nowotny et al., 2003) where the results are communicated and measures proposed. The aim is to analyze how valid statements are produced on the basis of PISA-results: Which kind of actors are present, what kind of comparisons are made and which conclusions are drawn, what is selected by media to be in focus for the reporting. The analysis has a particular focus on the making of diversity and context, and the surveys from 2009, 2012 and 2015.
References
Lindblad, S., Pettersson, D. & Popkewitz, T.S. (2015): International Comparisons of School Results: A Systematic Review of Research on Large Scale Assessments in Education. Stockholm Vetenskapsrådet. Luhmann, N. (1996) Social Systems. Stanford University Press: Stanford. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. & Gibbons, M. (2003). Introduction:Mode 2'revisited: The new production of knowledge. Minerva, 41(3), 179-194. Pettersson, D (2008) Internationell kunskapsbedömning som inslag i nationell styrning av skolan. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Uppsala Studies in Education No 120. Uppsala universitet: Uppsala. Runesdotter, C. Wärvik, G-B., Andersson, E. & Harling, M. (2015). Media attention and representations of national and international ranking lists in Sweden.ECER, 8-11 Sept 2015 in Budapest.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.