Contents [Please click on author name for summary]
Heinz-Dieter Meyer, Aaron Benavot Introduction. PISA and the Globalization of Education Governance: some puzzles and problems, 9-26
Taya L. Owens Thinking Beyond League Tables: a review of key PISA research questions, 27-49
THE FINLAND PARADOX
Janne Varjo, Hannu Simola, Risto Rinne Finland's PISA Results: an analysis of dynamics in education politics, 51-76
Tiina Silander, Jouni Välijärvi The Theory and Practice of Building Pedagogical Skill in Finnish Teacher Education, 77-97
Paul Andrews What Does PISA Performance Tell Us about Mathematics Teaching Quality? Case Studies from Finland and Flanders, 99-115
PISA, INSTITUTIONS, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF EDUCATION GOVERNANCE
David H. Kamens Globalization and the Emergence of an Audit Culture: PISA and the search for 'best practices' and magic bullets, 117-139
Daniel Tröhler The OECD and Cold War Culture: thinking historically about PISA, 141-161
Marlaine Lockheed Causes and Consequences of International Assessments in Developing Countries, 163-183
Sam Sellar, Bob Lingard PISA and the Expanding Role of the OECD in Global Educational Governance, 185-206
NON-EDUCATIONAL INFLUENCES ON PISA OUTCOMES
Heinz-Dieter Meyer, Kathryn Schiller Gauging the Role of Non-educational Effects in Large-scale Assessments: socio-economics, culture and PISA outcomes, 207-224
Xin Ma, Cindy Jong, Jing Yuan Exploring Reasons for the East Asian Success in PISA, 225-245
Jaap Dronkers, Manon De Heus Immigrant Children’s Academic Performance: the influence of origin, destination and community, 247-265
Yong Zhao, Heinz-Dieter Meyer High on PISA, Low on Entrepreneurship? What PISA Does Not Measure, 267-278
Stephen P. Heyneman The International Efficiency of American Education: the bad and the not-so-bad news, 279-302
POLICY
Alexander W. Wiseman Policy Responses to PISA in Comparative Perspective, 303-322
Notes on Contributors, 323-328
Introduction. PISA and the Globalization of Education Governance: some puzzles and problems
Heinz-Dieter Meyer, Aaron Benavot
Over the past ten years the assessment of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has risen to strategic prominence in international education policy debates. Through PISA, the OECD is poised to assume a new institutional role as arbiter of global education governance, simultaneously acting as diagnostician, judge and policy advisor to the world’s school systems. The goal of this book is to problematize this development and to question PISA as an institution-building force in global education. The authors scrutinize the role of PISA in an emerging regime of global educational governance, which has the potential to induce changes in how nations and states organize public education, to what ends, and in what spirit – and whether to so according to emergent international standards. They question the presumption that the quality of a nation’s school system can be evaluated through an assessment that claims to be politically and ideologically neutral, presumably producing disinterested data. They propose that PISA’s dominance in the global educational discourse runs the risk of engendering an unprecedented process of worldwide educational standardization for the sake of hitching schools more tightly to the bandwagon of economic efficiency, while sacrificing their role of preparing students for independent thinking and civic participation.
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Thinking Beyond League Tables: a review of key PISA research questions
Taya L. Owens
Since 2000, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data set has provided a resource of comprehensive information relating to cross-national educational achievement, describing socio-economic, cultural, programmatic and technology characteristics supplied through questionnaires to students, parents, and schools in over 60 countries worldwide. PISA offers social science researchers and policymakers an opportunity to explore perennial issues in education through these cross-national data. This chapter examines 74 peer-reviewed, published secondary analyses that look to uncover empirical links between student-, school- and system-level factors and educational success. Taken together, these articles provide a thorough examination of educational policy at the turn of the decade, spanning fifteen thematic categories. From gender gaps, socio-economic inequalities and immigration to classroom assessment practices, retention and large-scale system efficiencies, researchers have mined PISA data to address long-standing questions, moving beyond the league table to illuminate the contemporary understanding of the global state of education.
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THE FINLAND PARADOX
Finland's PISA Results: an analysis of dynamics in education politics
Janne Varjo, Hannu Simola, Risto Rinne
In this chapter the authors experiment with the idea of combining path dependency, convergence and contingency in explaining Finnish particularity in education policy and politics since the early 1990s, with special reference to Finland’s status as renowned Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) high-flyer. The focus of this chapter is especially on quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) in comprehensive schooling. The authors elaborate on and contextualize the Finnish QAE model by analyzing the ambiguous ways in which global QAE practices have – or have not – been received and mediated in Finland. Applying the theoretical concept of dynamics, they aim to subject a specific social field of education to scrutiny through the analysis of relations between the main actors and institutions, and the essential discursive formations and practices. The research material consists of documents concerning the provision of compulsory education at national level: laws and legislative drafts, memorandums and reports by various actors. It appears that the global education reform discourse has achieved a hegemonic position in the national educational rhetoric, whereas in the processes of implementation at the local level there remains a certain antipathy –against previous normative control mechanisms and equally against the present idea of ranking lists.
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The Theory and Practice of Building Pedagogical Skill in Finnish Teacher Education
Tiina Silander, Jouni Välijärvi
Education has been an essential part of the development of the Finnish nation and economy. Teachers have always played an important and respected role in society. Prior to the comprehensive school reform of the 1970s, the issue of teacher training was the subject of many major controversies. The process resulted in the final transfer of training for all comprehensive and upper-secondary school teachers to the university level. In order to maintain the high status and respect of teachers and strengthen the academic basis of teachers’ work, a master’s degree was established as the basic level of teacher qualification. Familiarising teacher students with the latest research and training them to conduct research became integral components of that degree. Today the status of a teacher is largely comparable to that of a lawyer or a doctor. The teaching profession has also remained a popular choice among young people. As a result, only 10 15% of the large number of applicants are selected for the primary teacher programmes. This chapter also explores the impact on learning outcomes of the high academic standards of teacher education and the popularity of the profession. It also analyses the present structures, the contents and the future orientations of teacher education at Finnish universities.
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What Does PISA Performance Tell Us about Mathematics Teaching Quality? Case Studies from Finland and Flanders
Paul Andrews
Over the last decade Finnish students’ performance on the mathematical literacy components of PISA has created much international interest. However, with respect to the two times Finland has participated in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Finnish students’ mathematical performance has painted a very different picture, particularly at grade 8. What is less well known is that Flanders, whose Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) achievements have been masked by those of Belgium as a whole, has performed as well as Finland with respect to mathematical literacy and, on the three TIMSS in which it has participated, it has been the most successful European system at grade 8. Thus, while Finnish performance on tests of technical competence, despite success on tests of mathematical applicability, has been moderate, Flemish students have led the Europeans on both. In this chapter, the author examines two sequences of videotaped lessons taught on percentages, a topic resonant with ambitions of both technical competence and mathematical applicability, by case-study teachers considered against local criteria to be effective. The evidence suggests that Finnish mathematics didactics are more likely to explain Finnish TIMSS failure than PISA success. Flemish didactics may have greater explanatory potential for both PISA and TIMSS success. Such findings suggest that performance on international tests of achievement may be unrelated to didactical quality as other, typically hidden, cultural factors intercede.
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PISA, INSTITUTIONS, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF EDUCATION GOVERNANCE
Globalization and the Emergence of an Audit Culture: PISA and the search for 'best practices' and magic bullets
David H. Kamens
This chapter argues that national societies are increasingly perceived as open systems as globalization has intensified. As a result, educational systems are losing their national distinctiveness as bounded systems and products of unique national histories. Instead they are viewed as being comparable on many important dimensions. As a result, educators are no longer accused of trying to compare apples with oranges when they announce the recent results of PISA or TIMSS achievement tests. On many dimensions they thus become comparable in the minds of politicians and educators. And furthermore, in the face of global economic, political and cultural competition they are expected to produce outcomes that give their nations a competitive advantage (e.g. high levels of literacy and numeracy). This emerging ‘horse race’ mentality about educational progress and success has the effect of creating standardized outcomes that all systems are supposed to aspire to. This increases the sense that they can and should be comparable on important goals. While narrowing the goals of education, such competitive processes have given rise to an international audit culture in which comparing national education systems is now a legitimate enterprise in many parts of the world.
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The OECD and Cold War Culture: thinking historically about PISA
Daniel Tröhler
The Cold War is understood as an encompassing cultural agenda according to which an enduring global peace and welfare under the leadership either of the United States or the Soviet Union was being promised. In the West the notion of ‘One World’ had become popular; it indicated the idea of a safe and united world based on the security and well-being of common people throughout the world, provided by US world leadership. However, when one of the former allies, the Soviet Union, started to express similar ambitions on its own agenda it became an increasingly distracting factor for the global vision of ‘One World’ under the leadership of the United States. As much as the Weltanschauungen and the political legitimation rhetoric between the two competitors for world peace differed, many of its means and measures – especially in the field of education – were surprisingly similar. This chapter demonstrates this thesis, taking the example of the genealogy of PISA, understanding it as a tool whose roots have been developed ideologically and methodologically in the course of the Cold War.
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Causes and Consequences of International Assessments in Developing Countries
Marlaine Lockheed
The increase in the number of developing countries that participate in international assessments is incontrovertible, with much participation enabled through the financial and technical support of international donor agencies, particularly the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This chapter argues that the analytic and policy questions of economists as well as an increasing demand for evidence of ‘aid effectiveness’ have fuelled a demand for more countries, particularly developing countries, to participate in international assessments. In the context of this ‘globalization’ of assessment, the chapter draws attention to the remarkable rise in visibility of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as compared with the formerly dominant International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) assessments; this rise is attributed in part to the positioning of PISA results in publications read by economists. The chapter argues that participation in all types of international assessments has benefited developing countries both indirectly and directly. Indirectly, participation has influenced norms for curriculum and teaching practice, leading to curricular reform and increased attention to teacher professional development. Directly, participation has strengthened the assessment capacity of their national testing agencies, through assessment-related training and hands-on experience in the process of developing and implementing large-scale assessments.
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PISA and the Expanding Role of the OECD in Global Educational Governance
Sam Sellar, Bob Lingard
This chapter examines the success and expansion of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and its role both in strengthening the position of the Education Directorate within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and in enhancing the significance of the OECD’s education work globally. The authors provide a brief contextualization of the changing role of the OECD in response to economic globalization. This is followed by an account of the changing place of the Education Directorate within the OECD’s organizational structure since the 1990s, related to the rise of PISA and the recent development of a cross-directorate Skills Strategy. They then analyse the expansion of PISA in three domains: the broadening scope of PISA (what is measured); its increasing scale (the extent of coverage); and efforts to enhance its explanatory power (to inform policy makers of what works). Data collected through more than thirty interviews with policy actors located at the OECD and within national education systems (Australia and England), as well as OECD documents, provide an empirical basis for the analysis. Overall, the authors argue that the OECD and PISA have contributed to the creation of new modes of global governance in education.
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NON-EDUCATIONAL INFLUENCES ON PISA OUTCOMES
Gauging the Role of Non-educational Effects in Large-scale Assessments: socio-economics, culture and PISA outcomes
Heinz-Dieter Meyer, Kathryn Schiller
In this chapter the authors explore the role of non-educational factors – specifically socio-economic and cultural variables – on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) outcomes. They suggest that non-educational factors like socio-economic and cultural variables have a strong, but largely unexplored, impact on PISA outcomes. They show that PISA scores increase with a country’s socio-economic affluence, as well as with measures of human development (like the absence of child labor and Internet use). PISA outcomes also vary with cultural factors like individualism and obedience to authority (power distance). The authors argue that it is not warranted to attribute, without qualification, high scores on PISA to excellent schools and poor performance to weak schools. Specifically, they find that there seem to be two paths to the top of PISA rankings: relatively egalitarian and individualistic cultures (like those of Finland or Canada) or relatively collectivist and paternalistic cultures. A country’s position on the global PISA ranking provides very little information about the quality of its schools. It is more meaningful to compare a country with meaningfully chosen peers – for example, those other countries with which one shares important socio-economic and cultural attributes.
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Exploring Reasons for the East Asian Success in PISA
Xin Ma, Cindy Jong, Jing Yuan
This chapter explores the success of six top-performing East Asian countries (regions) in PISA 2009 – Hong Kong (China), Japan, Korea, Shanghai (China), Singapore and Taipei (China). For each of these countries (regions), a two-level hierarchical linear model (HLM) was specified to examine student performance in reading, mathematics and science respectively. The search for reasons for success focused on (a) student academic behaviors; and (b) school climatic attributes. At the student level, there were striking total consistencies across all academic areas and across all countries (regions) in terms of highly successful students (a) being skillful users of control strategies in their learning, and (b) knowing how to utilize meta-cognitive skills in the process of their learning. Not only are these positive effects comprehensive, but they also universally demonstrate the strongest effects among all statistically significant student academic behaviors. At the school level, a nearly perfect occurrence was identified across academic areas and across countries (regions) of school disciplinary climate being the most important school climatic attribute to academic performance of students.
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Immigrant Children’s Academic Performance: the influence of origin, destination and community
Jaap Dronkers, Manon De Heus
This chapter studies the scientific literacy of migrant children in a cross-classified multilevel framework. Using data from the 2006 PISA survey, features of migrant children’s origin countries, destination countries and communities (the specific origin–destination combination) are taken into account in order to explain macro-level differences in migrants’ educational performance. The sample consists of 9414 15-year-old migrant children, originating from 46 different countries, living in 16 western destination countries. The results show that differences in scientific performance between migrant children from different origins and between children living in different destination countries cannot be fully explained by compositional differences. Contextual attributes of origin countries, destination countries and communities matter as well. It is shown, for instance, that the better educational performance of migrant children living in traditional immigration receiving countries cannot be explained by these children’s favourable background characteristics. The economic features of the origin countries did not influence the science performance, in contrast with the origin countries’ prevailing religions.
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High on PISA, Low on Entrepreneurship? What PISA Does Not Measure
Yong Zhao, Heinz-Dieter Meyer
The authors discuss the hypothesis that high achievements on standardized tests may reflect a school system’s efficient functioning as a disciplinary mechanism, representing the absence of independent and creative thinking. To focus the debate, they concentrate on entrepreneurialism, a key indicator of a person’s ability and willingness to take risks in the pursuit of innovation, and a key prerequisite for economic prosperity. Entrepreneurialism, they argue, is not only unrelated to the attitudes and dispositions that may produce high scores on standardized tests like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it is often their exact opposite. For illustration they focus on East Asian countries often touted as paragons of high educational achievements. They find that individualist and collectivist cultural dispositions produce opposite effects on tests like PISA on the one hand and entrepreneurialism on the other. Individualism is often positively related with entrepreneurialism, but not necessarily with the disciplined obedience that produces above-average test scores. By contrast, countries whose cultural traditions emphasize the individual’s subordination to the collective are naturally less well suited to preparing students for entrepreneurial careers, while the norm to subordinate oneself to the group makes the teacher’s job much easier.
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The International Efficiency of American Education: the bad and the not-so-bad news
Stephen P. Heyneman
There is ample evidence to suggest that American schools perform worse than schools in many other countries. The United States ranks toward the bottom of the industrialized nations on international tests of academic achievement in science and mathematics. Not only may American schools perform worse, they may do so at the same time as they use more resources than other school systems. In essence, American schools may not only be poor in quality, they may also be less efficient. This chapter will explore some of the evidence on education efficiency. It will suggest that in many ways the assumption is correct – American schools are less efficient. It will suggest that the reason for the inefficiency of American schools is the difference in the ‘demand to learn’ between American and other school children. But the chapter will also explore evidence that suggests that American schools are not less efficient, and in one new way of looking at the problem, it will argue that American schools are more efficient than the schools in the Republic of Korea, one of the world’s leading school systems. The chapter will conclude with some advice on the proper role which international comparisons may play in the design of domestic education policy.
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POLICY
Policy Responses to PISA in Comparative Perspective
Alexander W. Wiseman
Responses to internationally reported PISA results have differed among participating countries. Some governments responded with alarm and a flurry of reform activities, while others responded much more calmly or ignored the results completely. In spite of these differences, the policies implemented in response to PISA have demonstrated remarkable alignment within economic and political subgroups. For example, in some country groups PISA deficits have been associated with a push towards more centralized control, while others have responded with much more focused reforms (e.g. teacher education). This chapter investigates the variety of response patterns across countries, their alignment within national subgroups, and the significant factors that have led some policy responses to differ from to their subgroup’s trends.
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Notes on Contributors
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Contributors
PAUL ROBERT ANDREWS, PhD, Manchester Metropolitan University, is Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. He has written extensively on cross-cultural analyses of mathematics teaching and the impact of teacher beliefs on classroom practice. His most recent publications include a chapter in the edited volume Mathematical Knowledge in Teaching and articles in the Journal of Mathematical Behavior, Comparative Education Review and ZDM. A recent (2011 2012) President of the Mathematical Association, he is also a member of the editorial boards of Research in Mathematics Education and the Cambridge Journal of Education.
AARON BENAVOT, PhD, Stanford University, is a Professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy Studies at SUNY-Albany, USA, with interests in global education policy and comparative education research. Previously, he served for four years as a senior policy analyst on the Education for All Global Monitoring Report team at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. As part of UNESCO’s education sector, he focused on the areas of literacy, education for sustainable development, quality learning enhancement and lifelong learning. He is currently the editor or co-editor of five professional journals. His publications list includes three books, two edited volumes, 14 book chapters, five published reports, and more than 25 journal articles.
MANON DE HEUS has a Master’s degree from the University of Tilburg, Netherlands and is now a freelance writer and journalist. Her prior experience includes serving as a researcher and teacher at Tilburg University, where she taught courses on Inequality and Family Relationships.
JAAP DRONKERS, PhD, Free University of Amsterdam, is currently Professor of International Comparative Research at Maastricht University, Netherlands and previously occupied chairs at the University of Amsterdam and the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. His publications focus on a wide range of topics, including the causes and consequences of unequal educational and occupational attainment, changes in educational opportunities, effect differences between public and religious schools, the educational and occupational achievement of migrants, the linkages between school and the labor market, and the effects of parental divorce on children. He edited Quality and Inequality of Education: cross-national perspectives (Springer, 2010).
STEPHEN P. HEYNEMAN served the World Bank for 22 years. Between 1976 and 1984 he helped research education quality and design policies to support educational effectiveness. Between 1984 and 1989 he was in charge of external training for senior officials worldwide in education policy and between 1989 and 1998 he was responsible for education policy and lending strategy, first for the Middle East and North Africa and later for the 27 countries of Europe and Central Asia. In 1998 he was appointed vice-president in charge of international operations of an education consultant firm in Alexandria, Virginia. In September 2000 he was appointed Professor of International Education Policy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, USA. He received his BA in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley, his MA in African Area Studies from UCLA in 1965, and his PhD in Comparative Education from the University of Chicago in 1976.
CINDY JONG, PhD, Boston College, is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education in the STEM Education Department at the University of Kentucky, USA. Her research interests include measuring teachers’ conceptions of mathematics teaching and learning along with examining teachers’ conception of teaching mathematics for social justice. She is a developer of the Mathematics Experiences and Conceptions Surveys (MECS), designed to longitudinally examine teachers’ conceptions.
DAVID HUNT KAMENS, PhD, Columbia University, is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Northern Illinois University, USA and was a research professor at George Mason University, Fairfax, USA, from 2006 to 2009, studying women in science. He is the author of numerous papers on the topics of sociology of education and political sociology. His publications include a forthcoming book, Knowledge for the Masses (co-authored with John Meyer and Aaron Benevot), Beyond the Nation State: the reconstruction of nationhood and citizenship (Emerald Press, 2012), and The Evolution of the American State and Polity, 1950-2005 (co-authored with R. Jepperson).
BOB LINGARD, PhD, University of Queensland, is a professorial research fellow in the School of Education and the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Queensland, Australia. He previously held the Andrew Bell Chair in Education at the University of Edinburgh. Bob has published widely in sociology of education. His recent books include Changing Schools (with Terry Wrigley and Pat Thomson; Routledge, 2012); Globalizing Education Policy (with Fazal Rizvi; Routledge, 2010); and Educating Boys (with Wayne Martino and Martin Mills; Palgrave, 2009). He is editor of the journal Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education. Bob is a former president of the Australian Association for Research in Education and is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia.
MARLAINE E. LOCKHEED, PhD, Stanford University, served at the World Bank for 19 years, initially as a research sociologist with interests in education effectiveness, equity and quality and later holding senior management positions with responsibilities for education policy and lending for the 14 countries of the Middle East and North Africa and for the evaluation of the World Bank’s training programs for senior officials worldwide. She was previously a principal research sociologist at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ, where she directed research on gender and education. She has been a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development, a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and the University of Texas, and a member of various journal and advisory boards. She is author or editor of 80 chapters and journal articles, four journal special issues and seven books, including Improving Primary Education in Developing Countries and Exclusion, Gender and Education: case studies from the developing world.
XIN MA, PhD, University of British Columbia, is a Full Professor in the College of Education at the University of Kentucky, USA and a Spencer Fellow of the United States Academy of Education. His research interests include the psychology of mathematics education, school effectiveness and improvement, and program evaluation. He is the author of two books and seven book chapters, and he has authored or co-authored more than eighty articles in a variety of academic journals. His recent publications focus on technology in the mathematics classroom (Educational Psychology Review) and within-school gender gaps in reading, mathematics, and science literacy (Comparative Education Review).
HEINZ-DIETER MEYER, PhD, Cornell University, is Associate Professor of Education and Organization, State University of New York (SUNY) Albany, USA. His more than forty articles, book chapters and edited volumes focus on organizations, new institutionalism and education governance. He has been a Harman Fellow at Harvard University and a Visiting Scholar at Peking University, Penn State, and the East-West Institute in Honolulu, among others. Recent publications include articles on institutional design in Comparative Sociology (2012), on colonization of public education in Educational Philosophy and Theory (2010), and on dilemmas of decentralization in American Journal of Education (2009). He is also the editor, with Brian-Rowan, of The New Institutionalism in Education (SUNY Press).
TAYA L. OWENS, doctoral candidate, University at Albany, SUNY, USA, currently works as a research assistant at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she worked as a research and planning analyst for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission and as a legislative assistant to the Tennessee General Assembly. She began her career in educational policy in the classroom, as an English instructor at the Zaporozhsky Institute of Economics and Information Technologies in Ukraine and Ferghana State University in Uzbekistan.
RISTO RINNE is a professor of education and director in the Department of Education at the University of Turku, Finland. He is also the director of the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning and Education (CELE) in the University of Turku as well as the director of the Finnish Graduate School in Education and Learning (FiGSEL). His main interests and publications include sociology of education, international comparative education, educational policy, citizenship and learning in the knowledge society, and history of education. He has also published many articles and books in the field of transmission and building the educational knowledge base in Europe.
KATHRYN SCHILLER, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Administration & Policy Studies at the University at Albany, USA. She is also affiliated with the Department of Sociology, the Center for Social & Demographic Analysis, and the Nelson A. Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy. A sociologist trained at the University of Chicago, her research explores the role of schooling in the development of human capital, focusing on how organizational structures and social networks shape individuals’ developmental trajectories. An article in the Journal of Marriage & Family found that the academic advantages of living with both parents are greater in more affluent countries using the Third International Mathematics and Science Study.
SAM SELLAR, PhD, University of South Australia, is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Education at the University of Queensland, Australia. Sam has also been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Australian National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education, hosted by the University of South Australia. His research focuses on contemporary developments in schooling and higher education policy. He has recent publications in the the Journal of Education Policy, Comparative Education and Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education. He is an associate editor of the journal Critical Studies in Education.
TIINA SILANDER is the Head of the Teacher Education Department at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She has worked at the Department of Teacher Education as a Senior Assistant of Science Pedagogy since 2006. Prior to that, she worked in the Institute for Educational Research in the research group for Assessing Learning Outcomes. Within teacher education Dr Silander is responsible for planning and development of both primary teacher and subject teacher education.
HANNU JAAKKO SIMOLA, PhD, University of Helsinki, is a professor of sociology at Helsinki University, Finland. He is a member of the board of the Doctoral Programme of Comparative Research on Educational Policy, Economy and Assessment and of the Finnish Graduate School in Education and Learning and serves as head of the research group focusing on new policy, politics, and the governance of education. His recent publications include The Finnish Miracle of PISA: historical and sociological remarks on teaching and teacher education and Trans-national Technologies, National Techniques, and Local Mechanisms in Finnish University Governance.
DANIEL TRÖHLER, PhD, University of Zurich, is Professor of Education and director of the research unit for socio-cultural research on learning and development titled Languages, Culture, Media, and Identities, and of the Doctoral School in Educational Sciences at the University of Luxembourg. He is also a visiting professor of comparative education at the University of Granada, Spain. His latest publications include the AERA Outstanding Book of the Year, Languages of Education: Protestant legacies, national identities, and global aspirations (Routledge, 2011), and Schooling and the Making of Citizens in the Long Nineteenth Century: comparative visions (with Thomas S. Popkewitz and David F. Labaree; Routledge, 2011). He served as guest editor of the journal Studies in Philosophy and Education for the 2012 Special Issue (volume 31, no. 5), Historicising Jean-Jacques Rousseau: four ways to commemorate his 300th anniversary.
JOUNI ENSIO VÄLIJÄRVI, PhD, University of Jyväskylä, is a professor of educational research and Docent at the University of Oulu, Finland and Director of the Institute for Educational Research. As an expert in the evaluation of educational systems, he serves as National Project Manager in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). He publishes extensively in journals related to Finnish education and research-based teacher education. His most recent journal article, ‘Teachers’ Professional Skills and Research-based Teacher Education for the Future’, appears in the Korean Journal of Teacher Education.
JANNE VARJO, PhD, University of Helsinki, is a post-doctoral researcher working at the University of Helsinki, Finalnd, and more particularly within the New Politics, Governance and Interaction in Education research unit (KUPOLI) at the Institute of Behavioural Sciences. His current research interests are in applying the ideas of governance of compulsory education at the sub-national level and the political economy of education. He is currently working on a three-year post-doctoral project, ‘Travelling Policies and Embedded Politics – an Analysis of Dynamics of Local Education Politics’, funded by the University of Helsinki.
ALEXANDER W. WISEMAN, PhD, Pennsylvania State University, is Associate Professor of Comparative and International Education in the College of Education at Lehigh University, USA. His research and publications focus on internationally comparative analyses of national educational systems, technology use in schools worldwide, the transition from school to work, gender and education, and institutional approaches to comparative education. His work has appeared in Compare, Prospects, Educational Researcher, Research in Comparative and International Education, and the Comparative Education Review. He is the editor of the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education (Emerald Publishing, 2013) and senior editor of the online journal FIRE: Forum for International Education in Research (http://preserve.lehigh.edu/fire/).
JING YUAN is a doctoral student at the Department of Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology at the University of Kentucky. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a research assistant for a large-scale project on Students’ Academic Achievement Evaluation (SAAE) sponsored by the Ministry of Education, P.R. China. Her research interests include psychology of science education, school effectiveness, and advanced data analysis of large-scale surveys.
YONG ZHAO, PhD, University of Illinois, currently serves as Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education in the College of Education, University of Oregon, where he is also Weinman Professor of Technology and Professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. His works focus on the implications of globalization and technology on education. He has published over 100 articles and 20 books, including Catching Up or Leading the Way: American education in the age of globalization and World Class Learners: educating creative and entrepreneurial students.