Path Dependence and Policy Steering in the Social Sciences: The Varied Impact of International Large Scale Student Assessment on the Educational Sciences in Four European Countries

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explain commonalities and differences in the responses of four national educational science communities to the same external stimulus, namely international comparative large scale student assessments that offered vastly improved comparability of national results from the beginning of the 1990s. The comparison shows the epistemic traditions of educational research in the four countries and properties of the data produced by the international comparative studies to be the central explanatory factors for commonalities and differences of responses to the new studies.

Citation

Gläser, J., Aljets, E., Gorga, A., Hedmo, T., Håkansson, E. and Laudel, G. (2014), "Path Dependence and Policy Steering in the Social Sciences: The Varied Impact of International Large Scale Student Assessment on the Educational Sciences in Four European Countries", Organizational Transformation and Scientific Change: The Impact of Institutional Restructuring on Universities and Intellectual Innovation (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 42), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 267-295. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20140000042009