This paper explores how the OECD acts a broker of knowledge-making in the development of PISA, the most widely known International Large-Scale Assessment. Drawing on the work of Bandola-Gill, Grek, and Tichenor (2022) and analysing empirical data gathered through interviews with OECD staff and PISA contractors and experts, the paper analyses how…

The aim of this article is to explore the interrelationships between a national government and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in terms of the power and legitimization of education reforms, here based on the reciprocal dependence of the two actors. Although the current case study only analyses the shifting…

Since 2000, the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, has tested 15-years-olds throughout the world in reading, math, and science. Developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, and administered every three years, PISA is designed to yield evidence for governments on which education policies…

The aim of the present study was to examine the factor affecting reading performance of the students in a broad sense. The sample was comprised of a total of 752076 students who participated in PISA studies from OECD member countries during the years of 2000 (n = 159095), 2009 (n = 298454) and 2018 (n = 294527) in which reading literacy was the…

In 2015, Pakistan committed to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4's provision of quality education for all. Target 4.7 of this Goal acknowledges that delivering quality education means ensuring that students develop a set of attributes characterised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in terms of…

How could the technicality arising from eleven percent of students being excluded from a PISA test in Sweden trigger a polarized debate followed by investigations by both the OECD and national authorities? This question is explored in the study by drawing on discursive institutionalism, especially the concept of normative background ideas,…

The article seeks to refine two central concepts in scholarly accounts of national policy responses to international data: 'selectivity' and 'instrumentalisation'. It does so by broadening, firstly, the empirical focus of research to include forms of international data other than the performance data of global learning metrics and international…

This article analyses the media coverage of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by progressive and conservative media outlets in South Korea from 2000 to 2018. Through systemic content analysis, the study reveals that the tones and content of PISA-related articles were largely influenced by the political alignment between the…

Recent analyses of education policy have used the concept of the assemblage to explain how the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's education work contributes to global policy convergence and new forms of policy mobility. These analyses often use Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of assemblage to designate relations between things…

This paper analyzes the impact of global governance by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the Korean education policymaking from 1993 to 2017. This analysis also discusses the implications of educational governance in Korea within the context of a globalized world. We found that the inevitable influence of global…

This paper focuses on the role of the OECD as a boundary organisation in Swedish education policy during the last 10 years. This has been a critical period of the transformation of the Swedish education system. Post-PISA, Swedish education moved from a position of confidence and relative strength to one of crisis and slow recovery. So far, most…

This paper analyses Twitter microblogs over a 3-day period, during the release of the results of PISA 2015 on 6 December 2016 by the OECD. We document a methodological approach to investigating the social mediatisation of policy and its inclusive potential for enabling the participation of multiple voices. We draw on two data sets from the 3-day…

As the OECD and UNESCO increasingly work in the same geographical and thematic areas, this paper explores the interplay between the organizations in relation to the making of global learning metrics and the global monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goal 4. Although the organizations seek to cooperate, this paper shows how this is limited by…

The OECD is a key player in global education policy advice and part of the edu-business network. This network comprises of companies, philanthropies, consulting agencies and think tanks profiting from educational governance reforms and large-scale testing. This article investigates the structure of the OECD global policy network and its capability…

This paper examines competency-based educational policy-making in a global context. Specifically, it explores how the thinking around competency, spearheaded by international organisations and experts, has led to the development and deployment of a particular notion of global competency. Drawing on critical policy research, I examine three…