ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how large-scale international standardized assessments "act" on the practices of policy making and schooling. It examines Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a traveling discourse in order to study how it is reassembled and revisioned as it enters and is translated into different educational spaces. Through investigating the traveling of PISA into Korea, the chapter articulates how the modern project of fabricating the Korean global citizen is not merely an "effect" of PISA, but is a revisioning of a nation’s historical and cultural hopes of progress and fears of regression. PISA 2012's results for problem-solving skills, for example, produce cartography of the degrees of students' achievement that functions as a longitude and latitude to locate the student and nation. PISA 2012 Problem-Solving Performance focuses on the visualization of PISA data as providing a comparative way of understanding and formulating educational problems.
