ABSTRACT
The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement was one of the first organizations to focus on large-scale assessments of individual students' achievements. The organization was created on a reasoning to conduct comparative educational studies in the late 1950s—staging their first assessment in the early 1960s. In the literature on large-scale assessments, this kind of reasoning orders what is said and done through its measurement. The data statements of population taxonomies of gender, socioeconomic distinctions, connected with the classifications of school designs and education systems, together with assessments of school performances or other kinds of measurements. The thinking of numbers as 'inscription devices' is important when viewing international assessments and its visual culture in which the graphs, tables and charts are taken as a mode of telling the truth. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
