ABSTRACT

This volume offers a critical examination of the Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA), focusing on its origins and implementation, relationship to other international large-scale assessments, and its impacts on educational policy and reform at national and cross-national levels.

Using empirical data gathered from a research project carried out by the CeiED at Lusofona University, Lisbon, the text highlights connections between PISA and emergent issues including the international circulation of big science, expertise and policy, and identifies its conceptual and methodological limits as a global governance project. The volume ultimately provides a novel framework for understanding how OECD priorities are manifested through a regulatory instrument based on Human and Knowledge Capital Theory, and so makes a powerful case to search for new humanistic approaches.

This text will benefit researchers, academics and educators with an interest in education policy and politics, international and comparative education, and the sociology of education more broadly. Those interested in the history of education will also benefit from this volume.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

A success story? Critical perspectives on PISA as a means of global governance

chapter 1|14 pages

Invisible struggles, encoded fantasies and ritualized incantations

A critical infrastructure studies analysis of PISA

chapter 3|22 pages

PISA as epistemic governance within the European political arithmetic of inequalities

A sociological perspective illustrating the French case

chapter 4|34 pages

Pisa and curricular reforms in Brazil

The influence of a powerful regulatory instrument

chapter 5|22 pages

Testing PISA tests

A study about how secondary and college students answer Pisa items in mathematics and science

chapter 6|16 pages

International large-scale assessment

Issues from Portugal's participation in TIMSS, PIRLS and ICILS

chapter 7|27 pages

PISA in media discourse

Prominence, tone, voices and meanings

chapter 8|11 pages

OECD and education

How PISA is becoming a “big science” project

chapter |18 pages

Conclusion

Limitations and risks of an OECD global governance project