比较教育研究前沿
比较教育研究前沿
1.Negative capability? Measuring the unmeasurable in education
Author: Elaine Unterhalter
Source: Comparative Education (24 Nov 2016): 1-16
Abstract:
This introductory article to the special issue of Comparative Education on measuring the unmeasurable in education considers measurement as reflecting facts and uncertainties. The notion of negative capability is used metaphorically to depict some limits of what is measurable, and portray aspects of the process of education, associated with uncertainty and public scrutiny of complexity. Four overarching questions – what, when, why and how – have guided the reflections of the authors who have contributed to the special issue. What are we measuring when we try to measure the unmeasurable in education and what are we not measuring? When have attempts been made to measure the unmeasurable in education, what metrics have been adopted in which contexts, and with what outcomes? Why have measures been adopted as indicators of the unmeasurable, such as human rights? How have particular historically located organisations approached the problem of measuring the apparently unmeasurable in education, with what epistemological, normative and conceptual resources, and consequences? The introductory article looks at measurement as a form of negative capability in some discussions of history of social statistics in education, the current debate over indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals, and how to measure gender equality in education.
2.The limits of measurement: misplaced precision, phronesis, and other Aristotelian cautions for the makers of PISA, APPR, etc.
Heinz-Dieter Meyer
Author: Heinz-Dieter Meyer
Source: Comparative Education (17 Nov 2016): 17-34
Abstract:
Quantitative measures of student performance are increasingly used as proxies of educational quality and teacher ability. Such assessments assume that the quality of educational practices can be unambiguously quantitatively measured and that such measures are sufficiently precise and robust to be aggregated into policy-relevant rankings like league tables or employment-relevant effectiveness scores for teachers. In this paper I direct attention to a theoretical tradition which casts a long shadow of doubt over this enterprise. Drawing on Aristotelian and pragmatist scholarship, I argue that the classroom is a domain of practical knowledge or phronesis where quality is best assessed by a jury of experienced practitioner’s context-sensitive judgment. This is because phronesis is predominantly tacit and resists codification. It cannot be made explicit without major distortions. The current worldwide drive that aims at measuring educational quality in precise quantitative terms commits the fallacy of misplaced precision and violates the rule of “requisite variety” which suggests that an assessment regime is at least as complex as the system it assesses. The discussion is placed in the history of the controversy between proponents of educational efficiency, which was opposed by pragmatist philosophers like John Dewey and William James.
3.Assessing needs, fostering development: UNESCO, illiteracy and the global politics of education (1945–1960)
Author: Damiano Matasci
Source: Comparative Education (17 Nov 2016): 35-53
Abstract:
In the aftermath of the World War II, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched an ambitious campaign to improve access to education and to fight illiteracy worldwide. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 had legitimised international action to raise educational and living standards in the ‘underdeveloped’ areas of the world, many of which were still under colonial rule. Based on primary archival material, this article sheds light on UNESCO’s efforts to assess educational levels in these territories, notably by collecting, standardising and processing data and statistics. The analysis shows how the work UNESCO undertook to measure inequalities contributed to the reappraisal of the economic and social role of literacy thus laying the foundations of a number of pedagogical programmes designed for developing countries. The limits of UNESCO’s global policies are also considered. Against the background of the Cold War and decolonisation, UNESCO’s assessment of educational needs in colonial areas raised highly political problems, which significantly affected the global concern for the right to education.
4.Valuing and revaluing education: what can we learn about measurement from the South African poor?
Author: David A. Clark
Source: Comparative Education (20 Dec 2016): 54-80
Abstract:
This paper reflects on the identification of relevant aspects of education for measurement purposes. It begins by reviewing some detailed lists of educational capabilities from disparate literatures. It then considers how ordinary South Africans perceive education by drawing on two open-ended surveys, and attempts to reconcile their views with different education lists. The main finding is that most abstract lists need to say more about the practical side of education (skills, information and knowledge for everyday living). They also need to embrace a more joined-up view of education that can incorporate linkages between different aspects of education and between education and other aspects of well-being (including mental states and material things). The final part of the paper makes the case for embracing the complexity and imprecision involved in measuring education and briefly sketches a methodological framework that can achieve this end.
5.Evolving approaches to the study of childhood poverty and education
Author: Emily Hannum, Ran Liu & Andrea Alvarado-Urbina
Source: Comparative Education (28 Nov 2016): 81-114
Abstract:
Social scientists have conceptualised poverty in multiple ways, with measurement approaches that seek to identify absolute, relative, subjective, and multi-dimensional poverty. The concept of poverty is central in the comparative education field, but has been empirically elusive in many large, international educational surveys: these studies have not typically included measures that correspond to prevalent conceptualisations or measurement strategies in the poverty literature. In this paper, we contrast poverty conceptualisation and measurement in the poverty literature with socio-economic measures prominent in major international educational surveys. Disconnects between these approaches, and implications for understanding how the disadvantages of poverty in childhood are reflected in educational surveys, are considered. We discuss key challenges that continue to shape possibilities for incorporation of poverty-related concepts into educational surveys. We close with a set of recommendations and considerations.
6.Can mobile health training meet the challenge of ‘measuring better’?
Author: Niall Winters, Martin Oliver & Laurenz Langer
Source: Comparative Education (05 Dec 2016): 115-131
Abstract:
Mobile learning has seen a large uptake in use in low- and middle-income countries. This is driven by rhetorics of easy scaling, reaching the hard-to-reach and the potential for generating analytics from the applications used by learners. Healthcare training has seen a proliferation of apps aimed at improving accountability through tracking and measuring workplace learning. A view of the mobile phone as an agent of change is thus linked with a technocentric approach to measurement. Metrics, initially created as proxies for what gets done by health workers, are now shaping the practices they were intended to describe. In this paper, we show how, despite some valiant efforts, ‘measuring better’ remains difficult to achieve due to entrenched views of what measurement consists of. We analyse a mobile health (mHealth) classification framework, drawing out some implications of how it has been used in training health workers. These lead us to recommend moving away from a view of mobile learning linked tightly to accountability and numbers. We suggest a focus on an alternative future, where ‘measuring better’ is promoted as part of socio-cultural views of learning and linked with a social justice conceptualisation of development.
7.The professoriate: the challenged subject in US higher education
Author: Nelly P. Stromquist
Source: Comparative Education (28 Nov 2016): 132-146
Abstract:
Developments in the academic world – particularly among research universities – have been pushing US institutions of higher education towards structures and practices that defy the very values of equity and quality they profess to uphold. This is evident in the increasing quantification of scholarly productivity as well as in the growing division of the professoriate into permanent and contingent forms of employment. These two developments feed upon each other to produce a stark differentiation of organisational functions with research separated from teaching, with teaching devalued, and with shared governance a convenient but empty trope. Focusing on the concept of agency, this article describes these developments in detail, and explores the causes of the considerable loss of professional autonomy, as agency is weakly manifested to protect a more sensitive assessment of academic excellence, and even much less to defend the exploited contingent faculty. Exogenous forces have reduced the professoriate’s discretionary powers, yet there is still room for action.
8. Towards measuring the economic value of higher education: lessons from South
Author: AfricaStephanie Allais
Source: Comparative Education (21 Nov 2016): 147-163
Abstract:
A crisis of student funding has led to most South African universities being closed for weeks, after protests in 2015 and again in 2016. A policy response to these events requires insight into relationships between higher education, society, and the economy. This paper interrogates the assumptions which underpin current approaches to measuring higher education in South Africa. It argues that analyses of labour market relationships, associated with forms of measurement linked to rates of return, graduate tracer studies, and employer requirements and satisfaction studies, give us a snapshot of relatively contemporary data, but do not tell much about the dynamics of causation. They contain interesting information but should not be used to overclaim about the relationship between higher education and the economy. Taken together with other approaches to higher education evaluation, they tell us more about how labour markets are looking for distinctions between candidates than about the value that higher education adds to societies and economies. A clear public policy response needs better forms of measurement and better tools of analysis.