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PISA, global reference societies, and policy borrowing: The promises and pitfalls of ‘academic resilience’

Abstract
The Programme in International Student Assessment (PISA) has become the prominent method of international comparison of the achievement of 15-year-old children in reading, mathematics, and science. Recently, the OECD, which administers PISA, has devoted a great deal of energy promoting the notion of “academic resilience”—which refers to the capacity of individuals to prosper despite encountering adverse circumstances. Countries are compared and contrasted in relation to the relative share of disadvantaged students that are able to achieve at higher achievement levels on PISA, with associations drawn from school-level factors and resulting implications drawn for policy reform. This paper offers a number of cautions with the growing influence of cross-national comparisons of academic resilience. Our discussion underscores how the OECD’s notion of “academic resilience,” which has come to dominate transnational policy debates, is quite narrow and limited by the measures it uses to assess student competencies.
Type
Journal Article
Type of thesis
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Date
2022
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Rights
© The Author(s) 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).