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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.

This paper presents a moderated discussion on popular misconceptions, benefits and limitations of International Large-Scale Assessment (ILSA) programs, clarifying how ILSA results could be more appropriately interpreted and used in public policy contexts in the USA and elsewhere in the world.

To bring key issues, points-of-view and recommendations on the theme to light, the method used is a “moderated policy discussion”. Nine commentaries were invited to represent voices of leading ILSA scholars/researchers and measurement experts, juxtaposed against views of prominent leaders of education systems in the USA that participate in ILSA programs. The discussion is excerpted from a recent blog published by Education Week. It is moderated with introductory remarks from the guest editor and concluding recommendations from an ILSA researcher who did not participate in the original blog. References and author biographies are presented at the end of the article.

Together, the commentaries address historical, methodological, socio-political and policy issues surrounding ILSA programs vis-à-vis the major goals of education and larger societal concerns. Authors offer recommendations for improving the international studies themselves and for making reports more transparent for educators and the public to facilitate greater understanding of their purposes, meanings and policy implications.

When assessment policies are implemented from the top down, as is often the case with ILSA program participation, educators and leaders in school systems tend to be left out of the conversation. This article is intended to foster a productive two-way dialogue among key ILSA actors that can serve as a stepping-stone to more concerted policy actions within and across national education systems.

This policy brief, the third in the AERI-NEPC eBrief series “Understanding validity issues around the world”, discusses validity issues surrounding International Large Scale Assessment (ILSA) programs. ILSA programs, such as the well-known Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), are rapidly expanding around the world today. In this eBrief, the authors examine what “validity” means when applied to published results and reports of programs like the PISA.

This policy brief is based on a synthesis of conference proceedings and review of selected pieces of extant literature. It begins by summarizing perspectives of an invited expert panel on the topic. To that synthesis, the authors add their own analysis of key issues. They conclude by offering recommendations for test developers and test users.

ILSA programs and tests, while offering valuable information, should be read and used cautiously and in context. All parties need to be on the same page to maximize valid use of ILSA results, to obtain the greatest educational and social benefits, and to minimize negative consequences. The authors propose several recommendations for test makers and ILSA program leaders, and ILSA users. To ILSA leaders and researchers: provide more cautionary information about how to correctly interpret the ILSA results, particularly country rankings, given contextual differences among nations. Provide continuing psychometric or research resources so as to address or reduce various sources of error in reports. Encourage policy makers in different nations to share the responsibility for ensuring more contextualized (and valid) interpretations of ILSA reports and subsequent policy development. Raise awareness among policy makers to look beyond simple rankings and pay more attention to inter-country differences. For consumers of ILSA results and reports: read the fine print, not just the country rankings, to interpret ILSA results correctly in particular regions/nations. When looking to high-ranking countries as role models, be sure to consider the “whole picture”. Use ILSA data as complements to other national- and state-level educational assessments to better gauge the status of the country's education system and subsequent policy directions.

By translating complex information on validity issues with all concerned ILSA stakeholders in mind, this policy brief will improve uses and applications of ILSA information in national and regional policy contexts.

Over the past two decades, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has become an influential actor in the education sector. This has been accomplished, partly, by the administration of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) since 2000. Overall, PISA is intended to inform the public, parents, teachers, and those who run education systems of the status of education in their country. Research shows that policymakers draw on PISA results when they launch and design education reforms. To date, however, we know very little about whether PISA is successfully informing the general public, which is the main sponsor and benefactor of PISA. Using public opinion surveys from the United States and Israel, this chapter examines knowledge and perception of PISA. Recent reports suggest that both countries are in the middle ranks of all countries participating in PISA, with the United States being in the middle ranks of OECD countries and Israel being in the lower ranks of this group. Findings from public opinion surveys reveal three interesting patterns. First, in both countries, the public tend to underestimate how well 15-year olds perform on international standardized tests. Second, college graduates are more likely than those with less education to underestimate the performance of teens on international standardized tests. Third, although the public seems to be misinformed about PISA results, we find considerable public support for PISA and international standardized tests more generally. Implications of the findings for policy and future research in the field of international and comparative education are discussed.

In this article, we analyse how variations in organisational conditions for research affect researchers’ opportunities for changing individual-level or group-level research programmes. We contrast three innovations that were developed in universities and public research institutes in Germany and the Netherlands, which enables comparisons both between organisational settings and between properties of innovations. Comparing the development of three innovations in the two types of organisations enables the identification of links between patterns of authority sharing at these organisations and the opportunities to develop innovations. On this basis, the distribution of opportunities to change research practices among researchers in the two countries can be established.

The ILSA prototype was developed using an object‐oriented multimedia user interface on six NeXT workstations with two databases: the first with 100,000 MARC records and the second with 20,000 additional records enhanced with table of contents data. The items are grouped into subject clusters consisting of the classification number and the first subject heading assigned. Every other distinct keyword in the MARC record is linked to the subject cluster in an automated natural language mapping scheme, which leads the user from the term entered to the controlled vocabulary of the subject clusters in which the term appeared. The use of a hierarchical classification number (Dewey) makes it possible to broaden or narrow a search at will.

How did gays in the military go from being characterized as dangerous perverts threatening to the state, to victims being persecuted by the state, to potential heroes fighting on behalf of the state? What implications does this shift have for understanding the means by which the liberal state uses law to include the previously excluded? Offering a critical account of the inclusion of gays in the military, I argue that while the lifting of the ban can be seen as an important step in a classic civil rights narrative in which the liberal state gradually accommodates the excluded, pop culture allows us also to see state and minority group interest convergence as well as divergence, revealing the costs of inclusion.

Over the past few years, assemblage theory or assemblage thinking has garnered increasing attention in educational research, but has been used only tangentially in explications of the nature of comparative and international education (CIE) as a field. This conceptual examination applies an assemblage theory lens to explore the contours of CIE as a scholarly field marked by its rich and interweaved architecture. It does so by first reviewing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) principles of rhizomatic structures to define the emergence of assemblages. Secondly, it transposes these principles in conceiving the field of CIE as a meta-assemblage of associated and subordinated sub-assemblages of actors driven by varied disciplinary, interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary interests. Finally, it interrogates the role of Big Data technologies in exerting (re)territorializing and deterritorializing tendencies on the (re)configuration of CIE. The chapter concludes with reiterating the variable character of CIE as a meta-assemblage and proposes ways to move this conversation forward.

This chapter considers some of the limit points of contemporary relations between International Large-Scale Assessments, learning analytic platforms, and theories of mind circulating in contemporary comparative and transnational educational policy discourses. First, aspects of the rise of Big Data and predictive analytics are historicized, with particular attention to how emergent notions of concepts like an intelligent educational economy paradoxically seem to offer unprecedented opportunities for personalizing education that increasingly rely on efforts to construct, universalize, and predict transnational benchmarks. Then, the chapter pursues how such efforts to universalize measures and predict changes have located the mind as a primary target for solving social problems through educational reform. More specifically, the emergence and circulation of the perceptron in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s is suggested as one example of how efforts to model the human mind as a neuro-dynamic learning system became entangled with efforts to produce universal, mobile, and adaptive neuro-dynamic learning systems targeting the transnational optimization of human minds.

The chapter demonstrates that one way to read recent developments in national curriculum in nations around the globe is as both expressions of and responses to globalization. Additionally, the chapter argues that curriculum making today is affected by ever-changing imbrications between local, national, regional and global relationships. Examples of this include the curriculum impacts actual and potential of the OECD's testing regime and aspirations in relation to curriculum and the EU's creation of a European education policy space. The more recent rise of new nationalisms and ethnonationalism is seen to have potential impact on national curriculum. Some consideration is also given to the content of the curriculum and the contemporary focus on both disciplinary knowledge and on what sorts of people schools should produce; both it is argued are responses to globalization. The ways the message systems (curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation) sit in a symbiotic relationship with each other and the impact of the strengthened significance of international and large-scale assessments on the enactment of the curriculum are also documented. Some brief account is provided of the enhanced involvement of EdTech companies producing online curricula and the ways the pandemic has accelerated this development with the concerning potential for the privatization of the curriculum.