Facting fiction: Revolution,the United Nations,and cultural politics of electricity

In the summer of 2013, the United Nations and NBC began a season-long collaborative campaign involving the primetime television series Revolution (2012–2014), a show about the global loss of electricity, to promote the former’s energy resource campaigns. The two entities collaboratively produced various texts and events encouraging audiences to learn more about United Nations energy initiatives and how people throughout the world lack consistent access to electricity. This essay offers a close, rhetorical reading of the collaboration’s paratexts, examining stated responses from actors, creators, interviewers, and panel participants within this content. In particular, I argue that contact between the paratexts and the “formative” text (that of the show’s narrative) can encourage viewers to think about electricity from the perspective of their own material practices, dependencies, and fears over losing the technological world. I examine how these invested viewers interpreted the United Nations’ efforts through such commitments. Naming a fictive world, and its feared loss, as metonymic of energy politics illustrates how meaning, emotion, and texts circulate, while also implicating the use of celebrity platforms for sociopolitical issues such as energy access.     

PISA测试的限度:国际学者的批判

近年来,PISA测试的效应及其影响在全世界范围内不断扩大,也招来了不少国际学者批判的声音。针对PISA测试的批判体现出视角多元化的特点,聚焦的议题主要涉及PISA测试的技术、内容,以及政治层面的影响。从社会学角度进行分析,PISA测试体现了新全球主义和新自由主义的属性。基于国际学者对PISA测试的批判,我国的基础教育质量监测应汲取PISA测试长处、规避其不足,理性看待PISA测试的结果及其解释,并建构中国本土教育质量监测体系。     

Policy,philanthropy and profit: the OECD’s PISA for Schools and new modes of heterarchical educational governance

This paper examines the development and administration of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools – a new testing instrument of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – to demonstrate the relevance of heterarchical processes to educational governance. Drawing suggestively across new ‘relational’ thinking around policy networks, and new spatialities associated with globalisation, the research shows how PISA for Schools helps constitute new spaces and relations of, and for, educational governance. Informed by policy documents and interviews conducted with 33 key actors across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, I show how PISA for Schools typifies contemporary educational policy-making and governance via the export of ‘statework’ to private actors and agencies, including intergovernmental organisations, philanthropic foundations and edu-businesses. I conclude by considering how treating PISA for Schools, and other similar education services, as a ‘product’ produces a potentially dangerous blurring of public and private benefits, with the potential that (private) profit might ultimately trump (public) education.     

PISA truth effects: the construction of low performance

This article seeks to unpack the taken-for-granted notion of low performance, arguing that performance and competency are not a given categories; rather they are “objects-for-thought” that receive their discursive and material contours through a chain of translations. As suggested previously by Gorur, PISA is analyzed through the lens of Latourian Science and Technology Studies. The arguments in this article are based on an analysis of situations constructed to observe how performance is enacted in socio-material practice, as 15-year-old students collaboratively solve PISA scientific-literacy items. As background a text analysis, concerning how scientific literacy and performance are discursively constructed in various PISA materials, is reported. We suggest the notion of ‘competency’ be linked to the historical event of trying to start to detect it and argue that PISA results are products of the situated adjustments that are enacted by students and items created in the very moments of scientific measurement.     

Students’ test motivation in PISA: the case of Norway

Do students make their best effort in large-scale assessment studies such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)? Despite six cycles of PISA surveys from 2000 to 2015, empirical studies regarding students’ test motivation and experience of the tests are sparse. The present study examines students’ test motivation in PISA, and how closely students’ achievement correlates with students’ reported test motivation. A total of 40 students from eight schools that participated in the PISA study in 2006, 2009 and 2012 were interviewed. In addition, questionnaire data from a total of 9400 students who participated in PISA 2009 and 2012 were collected. The findings of this study indicate that students overall were motivated to do their best in the PISA study, despite the fact that these low-stakes tests have no impact on students’ grades or future school entrance. In contrast to claims in the media, where it has been suggested that Norwegian students are more relaxed towards the PISA test than students in other countries, students report that they are motivated to do their best, but girls report significantly higher test motivation than boys. Despite the policy influence of PISA and the large number of countries participating, very few studies have reported findings from students’ perspectives regarding their test motivation and experience of the test. The present study aims to fill that gap.     

Development of School Achievement in the Nordic Countries During Half a Century

The aim is to describe the development of achievement in compulsory school in the Nordic countries from the 1960s. The study relies on published results concerning literacy and numeracy from the international large-scale assessments between 1964 and 2012. Among others, the following conclusions are drawn: (1) for most countries, a small but consistent increase in the level of achievement was observed from the mid-1970s to around 1990 for both literacy and numeracy; (2) Finland improved literacy performance dramatically between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, which is hypothesized to be associated with the introduction of part-time special education; (3) for all countries performance declined from the late-1990s/early-2000s, which is hypothesized to be due to different factors in different countries.     

Think aloud: using cognitive interviewing to validate the PISA assessment of student self-efficacy in mathematics

Cognitive interviewing (CI) provides a method of systematically collecting validity evidence of response processes for questionnaire items. CI involves a range of techniques for prompting individuals to verbalise their responses to items. One such technique is concurrent verbalisation, as developed in Think Aloud Protocol (TAP). This article investigates the value of the technique for validating questionnaire items administered to young people in international surveys. To date, the literature on TAP has focused on allaying concerns about reactivity – whether response processes are affected by thinking aloud. This article investigates another concern, namely the completeness of concurrent verbalisations – the extent to which respondents verbalise their response processes. An independent, exploratory validation of the PISA assessment of student self-efficacy in mathematics by a small international team of researchers using CI with concurrent verbalisation in four education systems (England, Estonia, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands) provided the basis for this investigation. The researchers found that students generally thought aloud in response to each of the items, thereby providing validity evidence of responses processes varying within and between the education systems, but that practical steps could be taken to increase the completeness of concurrent verbalisations in future validations.     

国际阅读测试项目的设计思路及操作技术——兼谈其对中国阅读测试的启示

本文对几个重要的国外阅读测试项目(NAEP,PISA,PIRLS)进行了综合的介绍,主要侧重各阅读测试项目在设计思路和操作技术上的可资借鉴之处。其中,明确界定评价核心、明晰分解评价内容、理性选择阅读材料、系统设计评价工具、有效保证评分信度以及对评价结果的分析反馈等方面都为我们系统化、理性化地构建阅读测试框架提供了更广阔的视野和思考空间。     

PISA对我国中小学考试评价与质量监控的启示

中小学考试评价改革(尤其是命题评价改革)是20世纪80年代以来，我国教育教学改革的“攻坚战”，举步艰难。2000年开始研究制订、2004年12月刚刚公布第二次评估结果的国际性评价项目PISA(学生能力国际评估计划)的做法可以提供一些有价值的参考。这主要体现在，对学生的终身可持续发展进行评估；评价学生在实际的生活状态下的能力，测试学生在学校课程以外的知识运用；考试仍可以是评价的主要方式之一，过程性内容、情感、态度、价值观的内容完全可以在笔试中得到考察；建立教育质量评价体系，关注教育投资的有效性。     

2015年亚锦赛中外男篮攻防实力对比与竞争格局分析

运用文献资料、录像观察、数理统计及对比分析等研究方法,对参加2015年男篮亚锦赛的16支参赛球队的攻防实力进行比较研究,同时对当前亚洲男篮的竞争格局进行深入地分析。结果表明:在2015年亚锦赛中,最终取得较好名次和成绩的男篮球队其进攻和防守实力均较强,攻防综合实力强的球队其整体实力也优于其它队伍。中国男篮的进攻和防守Ci均位列16支参赛球队的第1位,进攻和防守实力十分突出,且攻防综合实力也排在第1,球队的整体优势较为明显。此届亚锦赛16支参赛队伍的竞争格局可分为5个档次,中国男子篮球队的攻守综合实力最强,也是唯一一支属于第1档次行列的球队,同时菲律宾、伊朗、中华台北以及韩国等七支球队的整体实力也较强,且都处于第2档次行列。