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…

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…

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…

Since the recent global paradigm shift in the governance of higher education toward business and marketing, internationally competitive education is increasingly considered as an asset for governments. Consequently, governments started to invest in education branding and marketing their educational systems. In Finland, national interest in…

International surveys have served as agents of change for the introduction of reforms in curricula worldwide. The Israeli Ministry of Education set a goal of raising Israel's ranking in international surveys so that Israel will be among the 10 leading countries in the Program for International Student Assessment and Trends in International…

Background: A number of countries have had school inspection for many years. The origins of these systems date back to the nineteenth century when mass public schooling was introduced, and education and other emerging public services were required to comply with centrally mandated rules and programmes. In contrast, many countries across the world…

Teacher education has been undergoing significant transformations worldwide in recent decades, and China has made continuous efforts in its quest for world-class teachers. This paper aims at a comprehensive investigation of the complex policy process in China's national initiatives to nurture a world-class teaching force, with qualitative findings…

In this article we provide a critique of the interpretation and utilization of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results by the National Education Authorities in Turkey. First, we define and explain what OECD's PISA is. Second, we make an overview of the media coverage in Turkey of the PISA 2003 and 2006 results. Third, we…