ABSTRACT
In recent years comparative education scholars have focused attention on infrastructures of test-based data collection, comparison and performance measurement. This chapter provides a sociotechnical analysis of currently emerging methods of predictive analytics and psycho-informatics. Rather than focusing on national comparison via test data, these methods emphasize the collection of individuals’ data, enabling individual performance to be analyzed and predicted in “real time” through comparative “big data” methods. The chapter will trace the development of intimate data technologies currently in the making, examine the implications of these increasingly “intimate” ways of measuring students, and consider how these analytics are intimately tied up with political objectives. The development of an intimate data infrastructure raises considerable new challenges in terms of how “comparison” is conceptualized and studied, and demands that scholars of test-based measurement infrastructures adapt their methodologies to respond to these new developments.
