This study examines the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), one of the most influential tools of global education reform discourses in the 21st century. The study focuses on the governing role of statistical data in the discourse constructed by the international comparative assessment, referring to the global educational…

This study problematizes the global educational governance of OECD PISA and its statistical data as a governing technology in contemporary discourses of education reforms. The study examines principles that order the discourses and practices of the international comparative assessment. The effort of analysing the impact of an education reform…

This article problematizes the way of thinking schooling in discourse of sign system, which involves opposition, and double gesture of inclusion/exclusion. Drawing on two fundamental texts of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu, this article puts forward the seemingly passive Non-Word and Non-Self to resist the hierarchy ordering of…

This article analyses international large-scale assessments in education from a temporal perspective. The article discusses and compares the different conceptions of time in the early international assessments conducted in the 1960s and 1970s by the IEA with the PISA studies conducted by the OECD from the year 2000 onwards. The paper argues that…

Mathematics achievement in different education systems around the world is assessed periodically in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA is deemed to yield robust international comparisons of mathematical attainment that enable individual countries and regions to monitor the performance of their education systems…

Against the background of the Deweyan tradition of "Democracy and Education," we discuss problems of complexity and reductionism in education and educational philosophy. First, we investigate some of Dewey's own criticisms of reductionist tendencies in the educational traditions, theories, and practices of his time. Secondly, we explore…

The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is increasingly depended upon by education policy makers to provide reliable measures of their country's education system against international benchmarks. PISA attempts to provide efficient, scientific and technical means to develop educational policies which achieve optimal…

This paper takes the vigorous political debate unleashed in Germany by the results of the PISA study as a stimulus to take a closer look at the strategic aims and effects of the current education reforms, of which the PISA study is only one example. It shows that the reform measures underpin a powerful process of normalisation. In this context,…