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…

This study examined which aspects of critical literacy are focused on in the reading literacy assessment for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 and what kinds of texts are related to the critical literacy items in the test. Based on theory-oriented qualitative content analysis, critical literacy items in PISA…

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results have become synonymous with quality benchmarking, determining standards and comparing performance among 15-year-old students in countries around the globe. Concern, however, exists with the utility and consequential validity of the newest measure to the suite of the OECD's PISA tests:…

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…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has garnered increasing attention since its inception in 2000. Correspondingly, there has been heightened interest in 'PISA poster countries' like Singapore and Shanghai-China. Yet to date, little is known about the processes and dynamics of the construction of PISA discourses within these…

This study aims to evaluate the validity and practicality of a discovery-group learning model designed to enhance 21st century skills. The model includes a guidebook, teacher's book, student's book, and assessment sheet. The study involved three main stages: a preliminary study, prototype design, and evaluation. At the time of this article, the…

Turkey's politically induced 'curricular modernization initiative' intended a philosophical change and a system-level transformation from behaviouristic to constructivist-inspired pedagogies in the early 2000s. Science curriculum has been one of the curricula that has taken precedence. It has changed four times since then. The latest science…

Two separate data searches underlie this analysis of how references to educational research and to PISA are used in the Swedish education debate. The data consist of 380 newspaper articles from the eight largest print media outlets in Sweden and 200 protocols from parliamentary debates (2000 to 2016) that made explicit reference to 'PISA' and/or…

Cross-national attraction is the first stage in international policy borrowing and analysis of its indicators provides insight into shifts in educational policies. We analyse cross-national attraction within the media discourse on the OECD's PISA in four countries: Australia, Finland, Japan and South Korea. Using the largest circulation English…

Reading skill is important to improve children's higher-order thinking skills. But PISA reading results show that children in Turkey are not sufficient for this skill. That's why this study aimed to investigate the cognitive levels of reading outcomes included in the Turkish course curriculum in terms of The Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes…

The Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) has been administered to 15-year- olds every three years since 2000. Since then, the U.S. has performed below average in mathematics, with no significant changes in performance. The objective of this study was to examine the alignment of the content students in the U.S. are assessed on in…

This article presents two independent studies of Finnish teachers' conceptions of giftedness and considers whether it is a malleable or fixed quality. The first qualitative study examined elementary school teachers' (N = 212) conceptions via inductive-oriented content analysis, whereas the second study measured teachers' (elementary n = 184,…

Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are psychometric models developed mainly to assess examinees' specific strengths and weaknesses in a set of skills or attributes within a domain. By adopting the Generalized-DINA model framework, the recently developed general modeling framework, we attempted to retrofit the PISA reading assessments, a…

This study uses a quantitative content analysis of learning competences -- as described and prescribed in 21st century frameworks -- and those competences evaluated by international assessments to explore the nexus between recommendation and reality. In drawing insights from the theoretical underpinnings of human capital theory we argue, with…

This article examines the extent to which the competencies of the 21st century learner are reflected in the learning outcomes within the English language arts curriculum standards documents for the Canadian provinces. Manifest summative content analysis was used to code learning outcomes in accordance with themes derived from the competencies of…