The life of data : Evolving national testing

Over the last two decades, large-scale national, or provincial, standardised testing has become prominent in the schools of many countries around the globe. National Testing in Schools: An Australian Assessment draws on research to consider the nature of national testing and its multiple effects, including: media responses and constructions such as league tables of performance; pressures within school systems and on schools; effects on the work and identities of principals and teachers and impacts on the experience of schooling for many young people, including those least advantaged.

Using Australia as the case site for global concerns regarding national testing, this book will be an invaluable companion for education researchers, teacher educators, teacher education students and teachers globally.

This chapter is concerned with the life and time of data, seeking to understand and theorise the current and possible futures of testing, both utopian and dystopian. It considers how new relations are constructed through data, such as those resulting from National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and international testing and how they reflect a topological move within culture. The introduction of national testing has affected a different kind of space in Australian education the space of media and public debate about the aims and outcomes of schooling. Indeed, new relationships between measurement and value are being reconfigured by the proliferation of social data in multiple sites of everyday life. This chapter has also shown that NAPLAN data in Australia have a life that extends to the reworking of political systems and educational structures, to the reconfiguration of what is valued in schools and to the potential integration of that data with other testing and assessment systems.

© 2016 Bob Lingard, Greg Thompson and Sam Sellar.