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:…

Creativity has fascinated scholars for generations, and its identification as one of the key 'twenty-first century skills' necessary for economic growth has led to renewed interest. This creates two challenges for the OECD: its flagship Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) does not directly measure creativity. Secondly, the…

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 introductory article of the GSE special issue 'PISA for scandalization, PISA for projection: the use of international large-scale assessments in education policy making' contextualises the four articles of the special issue in the broader context of comparative policy studies in education. It reflects in particular on the question of why…

There is now an extensive body of research concerning the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and its recent additions and variations. Despite this, we argue that there is a paucity of theory-informed empirical research on the ways in which the PISA results about a nation's education system both circulate within, and are…

In 2018 the OECD added a set of global competence measures to its PISA programme, and reported on the outcomes in November 2020. In this paper I explore the provenance of the idea of global competence underpinning the OECD-PISA Global Competence framework and measure. The official account by the OECD references the OECD PISA Governing Board,…

This article is concerned with the early phase of international large-scale assessments. Drawing on media discussions before and after the release of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) surveys of 1973, the chapter discusses the relationship between international assessments, scandalisation, and…

The OECD has become a major driver of domestic education reforms, especially since the establishment of PISA. However, we know very little about the contextualisation of PISA within the publication output of the OECD, and what ideas of education the IO is spreading. In this article, we explore the entire thematic portfolio of the OECD's education…

Founded on several highly influential quantitative studies, the past decade has witnessed the OECD and World Bank increasingly converge on the view that cognitive levels of students and education quality, as proxied by international large-scale assessments (ILSAs), are the primary determinant of national economic growth worldwide. More recent OECD…

This paper applies insights from narrative theory to analyse the OECD's transition to providing humanitarian large-scale assessments under the SDGs, situating this within the evolving dynamics of a global development complex. The perspective is guided by the thematic interests of the special issue, with the goal of enriching understanding of both…

Israel is one of the early adopters of international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) and it has participated in all but one assessment since the mid-1990s. However, we know very little about the reception of ILSAs in the Israeli context. To address this gap, I use a sample of news stories from two daily newspapers: "Yedioth Ahronoth" and…

This paper focuses on the OECD's PISA 2018 international framework for global competence. Given the growing national and international attention on educating for global competence, and absent of other measures, there is a need to scrutinise this framework. Our critical analysis is conceptually framed by academic literature related to (a) the…

The ongoing trend towards educational globalisation has brought about various dynamics of education policy "rescaling," resulting in a growing number of governmental arrangements, which are operating across traditional scales, levels or sectors of policy. This contribution takes up the conceptual frameworks of topological spatialisation…

The OECD's PISA exercise has by now been widely critiqued. Whilst we agree with most concerns, we begin with the assumption that PISA will remain an enduring and powerful feature of the global educational landscape. Even if the PISA test itself were discontinued, a similar large-scale quantitative assessment exercise would soon arise to take its…

By comparing two federal education systems, namely Germany and the U.S., and their reactions to PISA we show how international, large-scale student assessments (ILSA) have been used by national stakeholders to gain leverage for legitimising or de-legitimising policy reforms in education. From a neo-institutionalist perspective we argue that…