TY - JOUR
T1 - Configuring the low performing user
T2 - PISA, TIMSS and the United Arab Emirates
AU - Morgan, Clara
AU - Ibrahim, Ali
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the UAE University Research Start-Up Grant. We wish to thank ADEC for its support and UAE University for providing funding for our study. We would like to especially thank our research participants who took time out of their busy schedules to answer our questions and share with us their valuable thoughts. We also wish to thank the journal’s referees for their helpful and insightful comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2020/11/1
Y1 - 2020/11/1
N2 - Scholars of the global phenomenon of international student assessments (e.g., PISA, TIMSS) have paid little attention to the ways in which student users of these material objects are configured in nations that are located at the periphery of knowledge production. Our analysis takes the United Arab Emirates as its case study to capture the social construction processes and relations of PISA and TIMSS users, agents and test objects within global educational accountability infrastructures. Drawing on evidence collected from interviews with principals, vice principals and teachers in nine schools as well as with government officials, we reveal how the state plays a role in the re/configuration of the user in this process. We also trace the discursive and emotional narratives that delineate usage and the institutional practices deployed to solidify user re/configurations. We argue that user configurations induce institutional reforms, cognitive remappings, and affective reactions which reflect adaptations being made by ‘real’ users to misconfigured material objects. We suggest that rather than blaming students for their poor performance on global tests, it is more appropriate to point to a failure in the material object’s obdurate design and monocultural user configuration.
AB - Scholars of the global phenomenon of international student assessments (e.g., PISA, TIMSS) have paid little attention to the ways in which student users of these material objects are configured in nations that are located at the periphery of knowledge production. Our analysis takes the United Arab Emirates as its case study to capture the social construction processes and relations of PISA and TIMSS users, agents and test objects within global educational accountability infrastructures. Drawing on evidence collected from interviews with principals, vice principals and teachers in nine schools as well as with government officials, we reveal how the state plays a role in the re/configuration of the user in this process. We also trace the discursive and emotional narratives that delineate usage and the institutional practices deployed to solidify user re/configurations. We argue that user configurations induce institutional reforms, cognitive remappings, and affective reactions which reflect adaptations being made by ‘real’ users to misconfigured material objects. We suggest that rather than blaming students for their poor performance on global tests, it is more appropriate to point to a failure in the material object’s obdurate design and monocultural user configuration.
KW - International student assessments
KW - PISA
KW - TIMSS
KW - United Arab Emirates
KW - sociology of science and technology
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U2 - 10.1080/02680939.2019.1635273
DO - 10.1080/02680939.2019.1635273
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85068236808
SN - 0268-0939
VL - 35
SP - 812
EP - 835
JO - Journal of Education Policy
JF - Journal of Education Policy
IS - 6
ER -