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The life of data : Evolving national testing
Thompson, Greg Sellar, Sam Lingard, Robert Leslie
Thompson, Greg
Sellar, Sam
Lingard, Robert Leslie
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Education, Australian National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy, NAPLAN
Date
2016
Type
Book chapter
Journal
Book
National testing in schools: An Australian assessment
Volume
Issue
Page Range
212-230
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education (ILSTE)
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
Relation URI
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
All rights reserved
File Access
Controlled
Notes
© 2016 Bob Lingard, Greg Thompson and Sam Sellar.