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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 differences within and between the organizations -- differences which relate to their global leadership, their understandings of education, the expertise they draw on, and their approaches to Member States. The paper demonstrates the continuation of an established struggle and interdependency between the organizations as they seek to assert their legitimacy in the context of SDG4.

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 OECD brokers the making of comparative knowledge on learning outcomes. The paper does this by unpacking what counts as expertise in the making of PISA, and how the OECD manages and uses this expertise. Exploring the ways that international organizations broker experts and utilize expertise reveals how IOs first select experts and then delegate their expert-brokering role; they then seek to share the delegated process; and finally, take back expert-brokering and knowledge-production by creating, or decreeing, consensus. The paper also shows how expertise – beyond informing on a technical level – is used to shift scientific responsibilities and build global consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While methodologies are often presented as standardised procedures which, under specified conditions, should lead to the same conclusions, this case study presents the complex and deeply personal process of research (Addey and Piattoeva 2022). We analyse our application of network ethnography – an approach presented by Ball (2016) – to the study of contractors developing international large-scale assessments, exploring how we, as scholars, become with our methodology and navigate the 'messiness' of research (Law 2004). Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) to understand the constitutive role of methodology and performativity of knowledge-making (Law and Singleton 2013, Rimpiläinen 2015), we show how methodological decisions construct what is studied and ourselves. Finally, we discuss challenges of visual representation, applying Galloway's (2011) 'conversion rules' to examine what was unrepresented – or unrepresentable. This paper shows the complex, subjective, and provisional nature of knowledge, theorising 'heterogeneity and variation' (Law 2004) as an inherent part of methodological application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to further conceptualise participation in International Large-Scale Assessment (ILSA) as a global ritual of belonging and apply it to understand the appeal of PISA for Development (PISA-D) in Ecuador and Paraguay. The paper develops the theoretical underpinnings of the global ritual of belonging through policy borrowing and lending theory. The paper draws on ethnographic observations and interviews carried out with high level policy actors in Ecuador and Paraguay during their first implementation of an OECD education programme to understand how global policy tools resonate locally. Beyond demonstrating global accountability, mobilizing resources, acquiring technical capacity, attracting investors, and accessing the transnational accreditation PISA provides educational systems, it emerges that PISA-D is valued for the global stage it provides and the relationship it entails with the OECD. In the era of ILSAs, having a relationship with the OECD and appearing on the OECD maps provides governments with a form of legitimization and denotes states as modern and responsible.

The OECD is extending the participation of low- and middle-income nations in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). To explore how PISA can be made more relevant to these contexts, a pilot study, PISA for Development (PISA-D), was launched. Translating PISA into PISA-D required the development of instruments that had relevance to the new contexts while maintaining comparability across all PISA participants. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and Callon et al's theory of the three stages of translation of research, and based on detailed empirical data, this paper describes how the technical and the political, and the material and the semiotic, work together to make PISA 'fit' new contexts, while at the same time making the new contexts 'fit' PISA. This paper demonstrates how international comparisons demand profound changes in the ways countries come to know, represent, and act upon their education systems.

Drawing on Kane's argument-based approach to validity and Toulmin's later work on cosmopolitanism and diversity, this paper asks whose validity arguments and evidence are being presented in International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs), where and when. With a case study of the OECD's PISA for Development, we demonstrate that validity arguments are assembled, negotiated and transformed by the network of actors. We claim that the challenge of ILSAs is not to establish a single authoritative argument through the displacement of plural interpretations and uses. Instead, the tasks of an argument-based approach should be to create a democratic space in which legitimately diverse arguments and intentions can be recognized, considered, assembled and displayed.

Why are contractors keen to develop, implement, and analyse International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) when they appear to make no financial gains? What, if not monetary profit, makes ILSA contracts so attractive? Almost all ILSA contractors interviewed as part of this project state that their ILSA work is an investment, either in the form of a break-even or a loss contract. This paper discusses why contractors carry out ILSA contracts or donate to ILSAs, analysing 35 interviews with OECD and IEA staff and ILSA contractors and applying policy borrowing and lending theory to non-state actors. Drawing on Brostrom's (2012) study, this paper identifies contractor rationales on an organizational level that relate to developing improved or new products and processes, gaining access to networks, managing human capital, and creating direct business opportunities. This paper adds a fifth category of individual rationales, whereby contractors are driven by professional opportunities, lifestyles, and emotional bonds that ILSAs provide. What becomes apparent is an innovation rhetoric gap and that ILSAs are a 'golden door' to business opportunities. The paper concludes that contractors' motivations and agendas become encoded in ILSAs as they buy themselves into ILSA networks, thus shaping the way education is measured, understood, and acted upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Setting this paper against the backdrop of scholarly research on recent changes in the OECD's approach and workings in education, I analyse how the OECD has reinforced its infrastructural and epistemological global governance through the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Development (PISA-D). Drawing on qualitative data, this paper makes three arguments. First, there has been a reinforced effort at the OECD to align national and international large-scale assessments; second, the OECD-ensured PISA-D was enhanced only in so far as it remained comparable with PISA, with a view to joining up lower- and middle-income data infrastructures with the global PISA infrastructure; and third, the OECD has bound together the aims of PISA, PISA-D, the Education and Skills Directorate, the Organisation's Strategy on Development and the global education agenda (Sustainable Development Goals), thus strengthening its global education governance potential. With a note of concern, I suggest these recent changes in the OECD's work in education may be spreading a very narrow framework of educational values, which does not sufficiently recognise the complexity of learning and teaching.

This Forum discusses the significant growth of international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) since the mid-1990s. Addey and Sellar's contribution ("A Framework for Analysing the Multiple Rationales for Participating in International Large-Scale Assessments") outlines a framework of rationales for participating in ILSAs and examines the multiple localised meanings attached to ILSA participation. This framework is discussed under seven headings: (1) evidence for policy; (2) technical capacity building; (3) funding and aid; (4) international relations; (5) national politics; (6) economic rationales; and (7) curriculum and pedagogy. It shows how ILSAs can serve multiple purposes--a flexibility that has contributed to the rapid growth of the phenomenon. Steiner-Khamsi ("Focusing on the Local to Understand Why the Global Resonates and How Governments Appropriate ILSAs for National Agenda Setting") focuses on the local to understand why the global resonates and discusses how governments appropriate ILSAs for national agenda setting. Lingard (International Organisations' Rationales for Large Scale Assessments") examines the rationales of international organisations and the contribution of media coverage to the increasing significance of ILSAs. Finally, Verger ("Theorising ILSA Participation") theorises rationales for ILSA participation according to three frames for understanding global education policy: rationalism, neo-institutionalism and political economy approaches.

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Copyright of Zeitschrift für Pädagogik is the property of Julius Beltz GmbH & Co. KG Beltz Juventa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)