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International surveys of student achievement are becoming increasingly popular with governments around the world, as they try to measure the performance of their country's education system.The main reason for this trend is the shared opinion that countries will need to be able to compete in the 'knowledge economy' to assure the economic wellbeing of their citizens.Whilst benchmark indicators of knowledge economy 'supply' variables, such as investment in education as a proportion of GDP, have been available for a long time, countries had no way of comparing the effect of their investments and schooling in general upon students' knowledge and skills.Since 2000, OECD addressed this by producing a three-year cycle of 'curriculum-independent' tests of reading, mathematics and science.Each cycle has major and minor emphases, with one of the three skill areas consuming the majority of the assessment every nine years.Questionnaire enquiries are also conducted among students and teachers to measure contextual factors.PISA tests are taken at age 15 by representative samples of pupils in participating countries/economies, of which there were 75 in 2009.Age 15 was selected because it was the end of compulsory schooling in many OECD member countries when the programme was in the planning stage, but that is no longer the case in most of those countries today.Since the launch of PISA, OECD has had considerable policy impact upon countries through their publications and commissioned studies on specific countries.Indeed, with such a large body of data and depth of expertise behind the OECD reports and conclusions, policy-makers and practitioners could find themselves at the receiving end of 'steering at a distance' through 'corporate governance' from this global institution.The narrative of the global knowledge economy imperative is seductive, but it is questionable whether policy reactions to PISA findings take the same form in different country contexts.This report is the product of a short pilot project looking at the policy response to PISA in six case countries or regions.Deeper research questions have been generated from this project and we describe them in a separate report.High-performing countries (such as Canada, Shanghai-China) were contrasted with European countries that generally performed towards the average, but in which we knew there had been interesting policy impacts of the tests (as in England, France, Norway and Switzerland).As a methodology, comparisons through international tests do not celebrate difference -they are more likely to produce convergence in terms of what is seen to be valuable in educational terms.In the regionalized countries of Canada and Switzerland, there was some evidence of national pressure for more converged structures or data collection.Although assessment was undertaken in a number of Chinese provinces, only the results for Shanghai-China and Hong Kong-China were published in 2009 and there is little information about the policy response in substantive terms as yet.What we see, however, in the policy response in Shanghai-China is a reflective learning approach to PISA results, which is similar to that reported in Finland (not included as a case in this project as it is heavily reported elsewhere -eg Välijärvi et al., 2002).
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