THE RELEVANCE AND CONSEQUENCES OF PISA SCIENCE IN A DANISH CONTEXT

This article reports a case study that described and analyzed the changes in the Danish school culture induced and encouraged by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results. The educational policy and reforms that were temporally connected with the publication of the PISA 2000 results are outlined and the related socioeconomic and sociopolitical influences are explicated. Furthermore, we investigated to what degree the PISA science assessment framework and test system were in accordance with the Danish educational goals in science in order to discuss the relevance of PISA as a catalyst for the educational actions taken. The results of our inquiry revealed areas of good correspondence and fundamental differences related to values underlying the Danish school system and PISA, respectively (e.g., Bildung orientation versus cognitive skills/competency orientation, different learning/assessment paradigms). We argue that such differences are crucial when considering curricular relevance, validity, and the use of PISA as an agent of change on the national level.     

Inclusion: Dimensions of inclusion in education

The understanding of inclusion in education has transcended the assumption that inclusion is about students with special needs. It concerns the inclusion of all children. With systems theory as a framework, the article argues that in order to handle inclusion as a phenomenon that concerns all children, we need an operational definition of inclusion differentiated according to three dimensions. The first dimension covers different levels of inclusion. The second dimension concerns different types of social communities in and out of school, from which a child may be included or excluded. The class is one such type of social community, but equally important is membership in the self-organised community of children in the school-yard, the bilateral relationships with other children and/or teachers, etc. The third dimension concerns different degrees of being included in and/or excluded from the different communities. The point is that a child is not either completely included or excluded, but that he/she is included in or excluded from the different communities in different degrees. A comprehensive matrix definition is presented combining the three dimensions, which matches the present understanding of inclusion in education.