Internationalization of Nordic school reform : a two country comparison

International comparisons play a decisive role in education policy. Undoubtedly, major international surveys have altered the expectations of national governments’ policymakers over the last decades and urged implementation of international standards and best practices (Nordin & Sundberg, 2014; Waldow & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019; Ydesen, 2019). The paper synthesises findings and interpretations from a Nordic research project on evidence-based policymaking (Sivesind & Karseth, 2022). Moreover, itidentifies distinct patterns of references to international knowledge sources in national policydocuments from three of the national cases during the 2000s. Our analysis examines how international and national experts interact in reform processes and draw on the authority of international references to develop and legitimate their own reform solutions for basiceducation (grades 1–10). In the joint research project, Policy Knowledge and Lesson Drawing in Nordic School Reform in an Era of International Comparisons (POLNET), the research teams selected a comparable set of policy documents and their associated sources published by the governments of the five Nordic countries. The papers prepared school reforms for the level K9/10 and addressed broad themes, such as renewing national curricula, redesigning assessment systems and amending legislative procedures. The teams systematised the metadata and created a shared bibliometric database of the references. We also conducted interviews with national and international experts in all five countries. In the study based on data material from three of the countries (Finland, Iceland and Denmark), Ydesen et al. (2022) found that all policy documents in the three countries adhere to the demands and tenets of evidence-based policy. The OECD policy instruments tended to be more authoritative than the other references, and the authors solidified the conclusion that bibliometric references signify more than merely conveying informatio