ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the intellectual and social organisation of international large-scale assessment research. It draws on an interest in how research produces and communicates educational knowledge on an educational Agora – understood as a symbol for the interplay between research and policymaking. The chapter discusses some tentative conclusions about how this intellectual organisation of ILSA research also gains legitimacy in specific ways through its social organisation. It highlights questions about how ILSA research is constructed and presented on the educational Agora. Three different, but sometimes interrelated, research problematics evident in ILSA research have been identified: Equity problematic, Efficiency problematic and Direction problematic. Comparative educational research has developed rapidly since the late 1950s in terms of research programmes, the number of studies in these programmes and the number of publications. The general form can be transformed to capture a style of reasoning that presents how the research problematics are framed and which inquiries are regarded as scientific evidence.
