PISA is an extremely influential large-scale assessment, and its "policy lessons" are being incorporated in a range of nations all over the world. In this paper I argue that not only is PISA influencing policies and practices, but also that "seeing like PISA" is becoming a widespread phenomenon. Globally, education…

Large-scale assessment (LSA) is a tool used by education authorities for several purposes, including the promotion of teacher-based instructional change. In Canada, all 10 provinces engage in large-scale testing across several grade levels and subjects, and also have the common expectation that the results data will be used to improve instruction…

This publication reviews key structures, policies and reforms in the area of achievement in the basic skills (literacy, mathematics and science). It contains fi ve indicators on policies for organising nationally standardised tests, producing national reports on achievement, using student performance data in school evaluation, addressing…

In the present offering we challenge the presumption that the educational testing of students provides objective information about such students. This presumption largely rests on an empiricist account of science. In light of mounting criticism, however, empiricist foundationalism has given way to a social epistemology. From this standpoint,…

Policy makers at the federal level have embraced an educator effectiveness agenda, which in turn has driven many states across the country to rapidly develop and implement new and more complex teacher evaluation systems. It is increasingly clear that the success of these nascent teacher evaluation systems partly depends on the will, skill, and…

Despite a political climate demanding evidence-informed decision making in education both within individual countries and at the international level, empirically grounded European research in this field is scarce. This paper reports on a European Commission-funded study that sought to identify and analyze different initiatives across Europe aimed…

The aim of this article is to analyse the direct and indirect effects that PISA generates in the orientation of educational policies and reforms in Spain and the ways in which PISA data and results are used in political discourses, at both national and sub-national levels. The main hypothesis of the article is that PISA results have played a key…

Through a comparative study of the United Kingdom and Spain, this article addresses the effect of different research governance structures on the functioning and uses of research evaluation. It distinguishes three main evaluation uses: distributive, improvement, and controlling. Research evaluation in the United Kingdom plays important…

Despite the recent push to design and adopt educator evaluation systems, many states and local educational agencies (LEAs) have focused primarily on teacher evaluations and lack the appropriate attention to design and implementation of school leader evaluations and aligned professional development. And, since principals are responsible for…

Assessment permeates many aspects of our educational society. With the passage of federal legislation (i.e., No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004), assessment in the form of accountability is ever present in our K-12 educational system. Current assessment practices should be used in…

This paper gathers descriptions on the use of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and essential skills cross Canada. IALS was developed as a population measure to lay out the distribution of skills and their relationship to other social and economic attributes. The information was taken from federal, provincial, and territorial…

This paper investigates quality assurance in Chinese higher education by looking at the Evaluation of the University Baccalaureate Programmes Project (EUBPP) conducted in China. It analyses factors that bring about tensions between policy and practice in this area through a study of two contrasting tertiary institutions. The results show that the…

The articles in this issue call for a deeper and better understanding of data, their use, the conditions that are most conducive for using data well, how individuals and groups of practitioners make sense of the data before them, and the intended and unintended consequences of data use for school improvement. The authors together craft important…

In their opening comments to this special issue on data use, Coburn and Turner point to "one of the most central questions in social theory: the interrelationship between macro-social structure and micro-level action." Questions about data use--which entail social phenomena that range from federal policy to moment-to-moment interactions…

Child assessment practices in English and Korean preschools were compared by analysing data from interviews with educators, examples of child assessment, and official documents from each country. Child assessment in England was systematically implemented and characterised by several methodological and procedural strengths, whereas assessment in…