Usable representations, 'students' and OECD ...

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‘Will I learn what I want to learn?’ Usable representations, ‘students’ and OECD assessment production a

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Riyad A. Shahjahan , Clara Morgan & David J. Nguyen

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Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA b

Department of Political Science, UAE University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates Published online: 02 Dec 2014.

Click for updates To cite this article: Riyad A. Shahjahan, Clara Morgan & David J. Nguyen (2015) ‘Will I learn what I want to learn?’ Usable representations, ‘students’ and OECD assessment production, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36:5, 700-711, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2014.986715 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2014.986715

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Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2015 Vol. 36, No. 5, 700–711, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2014.986715

‘Will I learn what I want to learn?’ Usable representations, ‘students’ and OECD assessment production Riyad A. Shahjahana*, Clara Morganb and David J. Nguyena a

Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA; Department of Political Science, UAE University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates


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Amid growing debates around international assessment tools in educational policy, few have critically examined how students themselves are cast in policy tool production processes and discourse. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s concept of representation, we show how higher education (HE) ‘students’ are constructed, fixed and normalized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) initiative. Based on an analysis of AHELO texts, we argue that the OECD, during the early stages of test production, fixes and circulates the meaning of ‘students’ as represented objects. We identify and analyze two distinct representational practices at work in AHELO texts: classifying and organizing, and marking. We posit that by fixing images of the student as an object of learning and as a consumer–investor subject, the OECD creates ‘usable’ representations of ‘students’ to claim jurisdiction over teaching and learning in HE and to justify intervention through standardized testing. Keywords: students; representation; Stuart Hall; learning outcomes; international student assessments; OECD

Introduction The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) plays an increasingly important role in shaping global educational policy agendas through its diffusion of educational indicators and standardized testing (Meyer & Benavot, 2013; Pereyra, Kotthoff, & Cowen, 2011; Sellar & Lingard, 2013). Meanwhile, policy makers have come to rely on OECD’s international student assessments [e.g., Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)] to inform educational reform (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Scholars have examined processes of educational governance, the mechanisms deployed in these processes, and the use of ideological persuasion by the OECD (Henry, Lingard, Rizvi, & Taylor, 2001; Martens & Jakobi, 2010; Saarinen, 2008). Fewer, however, have explored how a culture of shared meaning about students – the nature of who they are, what they are like and how they learn – is constructed and diffused across policy networks by the OECD during the early development stages of its international student assessment tools. As educational scholars and practitioners invested in learning more broadly, we need a more thorough understanding of the complex ways in which the OECD fixes and circulates the meaning of ‘students’ during the production of its assessment tools. The ways that students are imagined and perceived by policy makers and test production teams in global policy circles have important consequences for *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] © 2014 Taylor & Francis


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learning outcomes, assessment of effective pedagogical practices and what counts as learning within higher education institutions (HEIs; see Tight, 2013). Taking up Stuart Hall’s (1997a, 1997b) claim that representation is always a political act whose investments can be determined by excavating the processes by which the meaning of an object or ‘thing’ is constructed, we suggest that images of the ‘student’ must be interrogated and challenged. In this paper, we presume that the OECD does not simply respond to educational ‘problems’ that are out there in the world. Instead, the OECD is engaged in constructing such problems through the very responses that they offer, including how they opt to represent students in relation to these problems (Bacchi, 2000). Our aim is to understand how the OECD problematizes and makes sense of ‘students’ in its representational practices during the development of its student assessment tools. Hall’s representation framework helps us to unpack the taken for granted representational techniques used in a recent OECD assessment initiative to construct usable representations of students. As Patsarika (2014) notes in her analysis of the representation of the professionalized student, foregrounding such representational practices is important because these signifying processes risk evacuating education of its ‘transformational potential both for individuals and societies as a whole’ (p. 4). Our analysis intervenes in debate about the representation of students in educational settings (e.g., Molesworth, Nixon, & Scullion, 2009; Patsarika, 2014; Williams, 2012) by highlighting the interrelationship between representation and power in global institutional spaces like the OECD. We examine and inspect text and documents produced by the OECD’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) initiative in order to trace and reveal representational processes. We identify the representational practices used by the OECD to diffuse a narrow imaginary of the student that has potentially negative consequences for student learning. By ‘representation’ of students, we are referring to a process – involving representational practices – through which meaning is given to or assigned to ‘students’ and the process through which images of ‘students’ are constructed and circulated (Hall, 1997b, p. 6). As Hall notes, ‘[r]epresentation is the production of the meaning of the concepts in our minds through language’ (1997a, p. 17). Representational practices entail the symbolic work or activity that ‘produces meaning, that makes things mean’ (Hall, 1997a, p. 24) and closes or fixes meaning. First, we explain why the OECD’s AHELO initiative is a fitting case study. We then elaborate the theoretical and methodological approaches we employ in this paper. Based on analysis of AHELO texts, we demonstrate how the OECD, during the early stages of test production, deploys two distinct representational practices – classifying and organizing, and marking – to fix and circulate the meaning of ‘students’. We argue that by fixing images of the student as an object of learning and as a consumer–investor subject, the OECD creates ‘usable’ representations of ‘students’ to claim jurisdiction over teaching and learning in HE and to justify intervention through standardized testing. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of this analysis for international student assessment projects in general. We suggest that these projects do not simply assess skills or knowledge, but are an important arena in which a shared cultural meaning of students is constructed and communicated.


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Why the OECD AHELO as a case study? Unlike international organizations (IOs; e.g., International Monetary Fund or World Bank) or regional organizations (e.g., European Union), the OECD lacks economic clout and legislative capacity. Because the OECD’s recommendations are non-binding for member states, it has developed alternative processes, instruments and tools for transmitting and promoting uptake of policy ideas and expert advice. The OECD’s policy influence derives from its knowledge production capacities and external perception of the ‘quality of its information and analysis’ (Schuller & Vincent-Lancrin, 2009, p. 66). It enacts soft modes of regulation, including publication of comparative data such as educational and social indicators, and country and thematic peer reviews (Kallo, 2009). Furthermore, its influence derives from demarcating norms and practices that further liberal, market friendly economic policies (Henry et al., 2001). Amid pressing global policy questions about how to effectively measure and improve the quality of teaching and learning across diverse institutional, cultural and geographic contexts (Stensaker & Harvey, 2011), AHELO constituted a controversial attempt to assess teaching and learning across global HEIs using an international standardized test (Ewell, 2012). AHELO was a landmark in international HE assessment development; ‘scope and intent were pioneering in many ways. It built on significant advances in efforts to map, categorise and define higher education outcomes’ (Richardson & Coates, 2014, p. 2). It represented, ‘the largest, most comprehensive assessment of universities yet devised’ globally (OECD, 2009, p. 4). Tested in 17 countries, AHELO assesses the skills and capacities of undergraduate students across the globe as they approach the end of their initial three- or four-year degree to evaluate quality of teaching and learning in universities (Ewell, 2012). According to the OECD (2011a), the AHELO feasibility study will help create, ‘measures that would be valid for all cultures and languages’, as well as across a range of universities and institutional missions (p. 5). The assessment is comprised of developing four instruments administered to students that test: (1) Generic skills, (2) Disciplinary knowledge in economics and engineering, (3) Contextual information and (4) A value-added strand (p. 5). (For further details about AHELO and its strands, please see OECD, 2012a, 2013a, 2013b). According to some assessment experts, AHELO was significant because it laid the ‘foundation stones for future crossnational assessments’ (Richardson & Coates, 2014, p. 8). While few scholars have critically examined AHELO (Ewell, 2012; Shahjahan, 2013; Shahjahan & Torres, 2013), the ways in which students themselves are constructed and represented in the educational policy tool process remain unaddressed. Although AHELO has recently been shelved because of OECD members’ priorities (personal communication, Jani Ursin), it is important to critically examine because it provides an entry point to understanding the processes by which meanings about students become normalized or standardized through the large-scale international assessment production process.1 In other words, AHELO exemplifies how transnational actors like the OECD construct ‘usable’ representations of ‘students’ in HE – i.e., they facilitate OECD’s ability to claim jurisdiction over teaching and learning in HE and to justify intervention in the global HE policy arena through standardized testing.


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Theoretical framework and methodology Stuart Hall (1997a, 1997b) examines the politics of representation, focusing particularly on how meanings become stable and fixed within webs of power relations. Any representation simultaneously indexes that which it (imperfectly) represents and renders invisible that which exceeds it (Hall, 1997b). Hall (1997b) suggests that what is left outside the representational frame or remains unmarked signifies as much as what is present, and argues that a represented object (here, ‘the student’) has, ‘no fixed meaning, no real meaning in the obvious sense, until it has been represented’ (p. 7). For Hall, meaning is malleable, both limited and enabled by the codes and systems it is embedded in: [Meaning] is not in the object or person or thing, nor is it in the word. It is we who fixed the meaning so firmly that, after a while, it comes to seem natural and inevitable. The meaning is constructed by the system of representation. It is constructed and fixed by the code, which sets up the correlation between our conceptual system and our language system in such a way that, every time we think of the tree, the code tells us to use the English word TREE, or the French word ABRERE. (Hall, 1997a, p. 21)

In his emphasis on uncovering the politics of representation, Hall prompts us to consider how actors with diverse investments in representations work to ‘fix’ meanings. In this case, the OECD, national policy makers, civil society and HE experts assign meaning to ‘students’, which takes on force as ‘usable’ representation (Hall, 1997a). How do assumptions about ‘students’ or ‘student learning’ harboured by these experts influence their representation in AHELO documents and render the student a ‘usable’ object? Hall’s emphasis on the role that code sharing plays in the representation and reception of objects suggests that we pay close attention to the particular code – embedded in AHELO documents – that links represented objects (‘students’) with conceptual and language systems. When we see the word ‘student’, an underlying code signals us to assign the student particular characteristics. Hall (1997a) points out that a system of representation is ‘not just a random collection of concepts, but concepts organized, arranged and classified into complex relations with one another’ (p. 18). Intimately tied with code sharing, we identify classifying and organizing as significant, and linked, representational practices that work to fix the meaning of ‘students’ as objects of learning via AHELO texts. We provide examples of how, through the representational practices of classifying and organizing, AHELO texts depict the student as an object of learning who is a passive and subject-oriented learner. Hall notes that when meaning is being constructed, certain aspects of the represented object are marked, or have been ‘drawn attention to’, while other aspects remain unmarked or absent (Hall, 1997b, p. 15). We find that the representational practice of marking ‘students’ as consumer–investor subjects in AHELO texts contributes to a narrow imaginary of the student. All other possible constructs of a ‘student’ remain unmarked or absent. In particular, the student as a learner who learns for the sake of learning is invisible with this marking strategy. Using Hall’s representational framework, we critically examined publicly available AHELO texts such as OECD’s AHELO website, promotional material, and declassified documents available on the website. The latter includes AHELO working papers, meeting minutes, seminar presentations, progress reports, newsletters, and interviews with various stakeholders. The initial audience for these documents was comprised mostly of those


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involved in the development and implementation of AHELO, including technical experts, national project managers, OECD secretariat staff and contractors. In order to garner support and address AHELO’s financial shortcomings (see Ewell, 2012; OECD, 2013a, 2013b; Shahjahan & Torres, 2013), the OECD later released AHELO documents to a broader audience that included HE associations, institutions and OECD member/nonmember governments. These documents serve as a rich source of qualitative data for understanding the representation of students (Merriam, 1998). For our analysis, we selected OECD documents that were salient to our line of inquiry and available in the AHELO debates during May 2010–March 2013. A total of 86 OECD produced documents were initially considered. Upon closer inspection of these documents, we removed 25 documents that did not specifically address ‘students’. The remaining 61 documents were closely inspected, evaluated and analyzed. Our document analysis centered on first open coding the sections of these texts that deployed the following set of keywords: students, student learning and learners. As a result, the number of texts were reduced to those 54 texts that substantively discussed ‘students’ and ‘student learning’, and were most salient in AHELO debates. We collectively discussed the coded text to further distill these themes. The second phase of analysis involved both coding (deductive and inductive) (Merriam, 1998), as well as ‘writing as a method of inquiry’ (Richardson & St Pierre, 2005). Using Hall’s framework as a backdrop, we coded the final chosen documents by paying attention to underlying value assumptions, and to rhetorical and persuasive features. For instance, as we closely examined a coded AHELO narrative from one document about students, we would use Hall’s framework or secondary literature to frame, support and/or refute what this particular AHELO narrative had to say (see Yanow, 2000). Through co-authoring, we foregrounded ‘peer examination’ and ‘triangulation’ in our interpretations of the AHELO texts (Merriam, 1998, p. 204). In the following analytic sections, we demonstrate that the OECD deploys two distinct representational practices to fix meaning about students. OECD’s representational practices to fix and circulate the meaning of ‘students’ Classifying and organizing the student as an ‘object of learning’ As mentioned earlier, classifying and organizing involves arranging concepts and building relations between concepts that work to organize things into various categories. Concepts allow us to store, link and think about objects that are no longer visible in our perceptual apparatus (Hall, 1997b). In this section, we highlight how classification and organizational representational practices work in AHELO texts to construct a fixed and useful image of ‘students’ and ‘learning’, thereby fixing the meaning of students as objects of learning. By ‘object of learning’, we are referring to the construction of the student as: (1) a passive learner and (2) a subject-oriented learner (i.e., in terms of process, purpose and content of learning). According to Cranton (1994), a subjectoriented learner is one who wants to acquire content (e.g., facts, problem solving strategies, practical or technical skills), but it is the expert who makes the decisions about what should be learned, and not the learner. We will argue that a chain of equivalence is created among a passive learner, subject-oriented learning, purpose of HE and universal knowledge, thereby constituting the student-object as usable representation that can be shared among AHELO experts, stakeholders and audience to justify intervention in student learning.


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The behaviorist notion, and conversely a usable representation, of a passive learner as an ‘empty vessel to be filled’ (Merriam & Bierema, 2014, p. 36) is prevalent in AHELO texts. The student as a learner only becomes visible when acted upon, and is constructed as a ‘passive object’ to which learning happens. For instance, the 2010–2011 AHELO Brochure, meant for a broader HE policy audience, focuses on the need to distill the elements of HEIs that accept B students and produce A+ graduates:


When a straight-A student enters university, few teachers or fellow students are surprised if he or she graduates with straight-As. But the B student who graduates with an A+ reveals more. Assuming that both HEIs [higher education institutions] are of [a] similar standard, one would say that the ‘value-added’ factor of the second university is higher. (OECD, 2010, p. 10, emphasis added)

Here, students are rendered passive objects who are transformed by forces outside of themselves from somewhat competent to excellent learners in a few years. Unlike constructivists who see learners as ‘active organisms that make-meaning’, the learner is depicted as a bank into which learning is deposited or infused (Merriam & Bierema, 2014, p. 36). The grading concept used in the brochure visualizes and constitutes a student in terms of intellectual ability, thereby helping us to store, think about and link the constituted student with the ‘purpose of higher education’. By categorizing students using measures of intellectual ability and grading (i.e., A+ versus B), the AHELO brochure constructs a hierarchy of knowledge and ability, and, in doing so, codifies the purpose of HEIs, which is to transform students from B to A+ graduates. In other words, both the student and purpose of HE are simultaneously codified in this representational process. The former becomes a passive object of learning, defined through intellectual ability, and the latter is coded as transformative of that ability. As such, other notions of students and of the purpose of HE – as a trajectory of self-growth or self-determination or as productive of civic abilities – are rendered invisible. Fixing the student as a passive learner is a useful representation because it allows OECD ‘experts’ and associated policy makers to intervene in learning. In a 2012 project update for AHELO’s Economics strand, the passive learner is again depicted, but with different imagery: The framework and the instrument aim to assess learning outcomes which students should be able to achieve by the end of a bachelor-type degree, such as demonstrating subject knowledge and understanding; demonstrating subject knowledge and its application to real world problems. (OECD, 2012b, p. 3, emphasis added)

This narrative strips the student of autonomy in determining their own learning outcomes. Instead, learning outcomes are codified and justified as understanding, demonstrating and applying of subject knowledge. While the learner is standardized as passive here, the outcomes of learning articulate the skills and competencies students ‘should’ leave with. Using precise language that links achievement, credentials, content of learning and competencies together, the student is classified and organized as a passive learner upon whom learning will work its magic to draw out particular behaviors. As such, the meaning of ‘student’ is fixed and rendered useful for OECD experts who wish to intervene in specific ways upon the student as a measure of educational success.

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By classifying and organizing concepts, AHELO texts fix students as ‘subjectoriented’ learners. The subject-oriented learner also appears in the following two excerpts:


The aim is to assess competencies that are fundamental and ‘above content’, i.e. with the focus on the capacity of students to extrapolate from what they have learned and apply their competencies in novel contexts unfamiliar to them. (OECD, 2007a, p. 5, emphasis added) Students complete the assessment by exercising their critical skills with data provided for each task. The questions are not specialised so that they can be answered by the majority of undergraduates, whatever their field of study. (OECD, 2009, p. 8, emphasis added)

In the first narrative, students are depicted as subject-oriented learners that are interested in developing competent skills that will easily transfer to new situational contexts. As such, an underlying assumption of the value of positivist knowledge ignores the context of the learner, or the socio-historical context of learning processes. The social reality of students is constructed by linking the concepts of ‘above-content’ universal applications of knowledge, with the purpose of learning. Given the first excerpt is from meeting minutes that are shared among AHELO experts, such representations of students are useful for constructing a shared conceptual map within which students and their learning can be efficiently thought and discussed within a particular epistemic community (Haas, 1992). In the second narrative, students behave in particular ways; for example, they exercise their critical skills or demonstrate above content learning. The concept of ‘nonspecialization’, ‘majority’ and ‘field of study’ are linked together to make an argument for universal applicability of what counts as valid knowledge. In both excerpts, students are constructed as passive objects in the face an external force that predetermines their learning outcomes. The student as a subject oriented-learner is further fixed in discussions about the purpose of learning in AHELO texts. The first AHELO brochure, disseminated in 2009, sought to communicate AHELO’s purpose to a broad audience. In the process, acquisition of ‘bottom line’ skills and ‘above content’ knowledge are authorized as the goals for students: The discipline specific strands measure a student’s competence in his or her chosen field. This is the ‘bottom line’ of an education, what students and employers really care about. However, the simple demonstration of factual knowledge is not enough. In AHELO, the student must demonstrate the ‘above content’ part of learning by applying it in concrete and often novel situations. (OECD, 2009, p. 9)

The OECD not only fixes the meaning of ‘student learning’ as something to be broken down and classified, but it also assigns a higher value to ‘above content’ student learning, a new cognitive category that it has constructed. In this way, when we think of the student as learner, the correlation of the conceptual system to the language system produces a code that makes us think of ‘above-content’ and ‘below-content’ skills; of ‘generic skills’ or ‘transversal higher competencies’ and ‘discipline-specific skills’. But in doing so, the student becomes a ‘fragmented being’ who can be dissected into various parts pertinent to learning. While ‘the student’ mentioned in the last sentence is depicted as a passive object, the second sentence represents the student as an active subject who ‘cares’ about the bottom line of education. AHELO texts construct a passive object for learning


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intervention, but an active and autonomous subject for the purpose of justifying what OECD takes to be the outcomes of learning (we discuss this further in the next section). The brochure’s presumption of ‘universally applicable knowledge’ is given force in its intertextuality with countless other AHELO texts, solidifying a shared AHELO conceptual investment in positivist knowledge. In summary, AHELO texts do not necessarily ‘reflect’ the meaning of students and their learning, but instead actively construct and assign particular meanings to students who discursively become objects of learning. Consequently, students are extracted from their social contexts for the purposes of more easily engineering and manipulating their learning. Marking: the ‘student’ as consumer–investor subject The second AHELO representational practice we analyze is ‘marking’, where the student becomes a consumer–investor subject. Students are cast as buyers of educational goods and services and as investors who put money into education to receive a profit. As investors, students expect returns on educational investments. Unlike the image of students as passive objects discussed above, students are marked in promotional brochures, newsletters, meeting minutes and feasibility reports for experts in HE, policy-makers, stakeholders as well as the general public as active, autonomous, consumer–investor subjects. This latter image gains force in a neoliberal paradigm that undergirds global HE today, ‘a mode of existence where students seek to “have a degree” rather than “be learners”’ (Molesworth et al., 2009, p. 278). The consumer–investor image distorts pedagogical relations in HE by implying that students no longer bear responsibility for their own learning since education can be purchased (Naidoo & Jamieson, 2005). In this sense, the student is a ‘passive consumer of education’ (2005, p. 272), a coded meaning closely associated with the ‘passive learner’ discussed above. We suggest that this narrow imaginary of the student as consumer–investor forecloses meanings and subjectivities that fall outside the frame of homo economicus, with important implications for global HE. We find the practice of marking particularly prevalent in AHELO promotional brochures, an important medium for communicating AHELO’s rationale to a broad audience of educational experts, policy makers, decision-makers, HEIs and the general public. The student becomes marked as a potential investor who requires impartial information that can help direct his/her monies. Rhetoric in these brochures draw our attention to the ‘voice’ of the consumer–investor student who, ostensibly, poses the following questions: ‘Will I learn what I want to learn? Will my diploma prepare me for a career? Will it be recognized if I transfer to a different university or move to another country?’ (OECD, 2009, p. 3). The marking of a monolithic and universal ‘I’ that stands in for the consumer subject seeks to invite the reader into the shoes of the consumer– investor. AHELO employs personalized selling tactics to entice the reader to empathize with the universal learner who can find answers to these questions in AHELO data sets. The marking of the student as a consumer-subject in AHELO texts is closely entangled with representational practices that mark HEIs as market-driven entities concerned with standards, comparison, ranking, output and production (Ball, 2000). The same AHELO brochure suggests that university administrators ask questions like the following: ‘Is our university up to standard? How can we improve? Do we really have to cut this degree programme [sic] because it doesn’t contribute to securing us a higher place in the ranks?’ (OECD, 2009, p. 3). This reinforces the imagery of an educational market

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of buyers and sellers concerned with the quality of learning and learning outcomes. These are usable representations that allow the OECD to claim jurisdiction over teaching and learning in HE and to justify intervention through standardized testing. The consumer–investor representation is bolstered by the image of the skills-seeking student. AHELO brochures published in 2010 and in 2011 mark students who ‘need to acquire the right skills to contribute to economic, scientific and social progress’ (OECD, 2010, p. 2; OECD, 2011b, p. 2). This vision for HE is elaborated in greater detail in a chapter of the AHELO Feasibility Report, Volume 1, entitled, ‘The Rationale for an AHELO: Higher Education in the 21st Century Context’ (OECD, 2012a). Students are described as increasingly diverse, and the report emphasizes their changing demands and consumer preferences, and fixes students as interested in skills and knowledge that will enable their success in the labour market: Learners increasingly seek courses that enable them to update their knowledge throughout their working lives. In addition, as learners seek to acquire particular knowledge or skills to satisfy labour market needs, more and more prefer to pick and choose courses from the most suitable providers, rather than studying a traditional clearly defined programme at one institution. (OECD 2012a, p. 21)

This marks students as lifelong learners, and also lifelong workers. Any other forms of learning that students may wish to pursue beyond their working lives are eclipsed. AHELO reproduces an image of learners who consume educational products by ‘pick [ing] and choos[ing]’ their courses from among a range of educational service providers. The HE system is cast as a market-driven entity that strives to meet the needs of its student-clients. As Molesworth et al. (2009) note, ‘[t]he emerging role of some parts of HE is now to fix in students an unquestioning acceptance of the primacy of consumer desires met by market offerings’ (p. 279). Representations of consumer-subjects and market-driven HEIs disregard education’s transformative potential. In the introduction of the 2011–2012 AHELO brochure, Barbara Ischinger, Director for Education at the OECD, notes AHELO’s purpose: to help individuals (including students), institutions and governments enhance the return on their educational investment[s] (OECD, 2011b, p. 2). Students are marked, differentiated and rendered visible in terms of their financial interests, erasing their position as humanistic learners (Molesworth et al., 2009). The student as consumer–investor is useful to an OECD increasingly interested in intervening in HE from the standpoint of learning outcomes. The process of marking students solely in terms of a consumer–investor subject is further reinforced when combined with a picture of Barbara Ischinger, an OECD authority figure, whose message carries weight and can be trusted by those receiving the message. The 2007 OECD meeting minutes from the second meeting of AHELO experts also marks students as consumers who seek information to make wise educational investments. AHELO experts endorse their role as enablers of consumer choice: [t]he lack of reliable information on teaching and learning in most countries forced consumers to rely on reputational information based primarily on research performance and input factors. (OECD, 2007b, p. 3)

Informed consumers require data to guide their decisions. These data include, ‘learning outcomes data, cross-institutional comparative data, as well as contextual data on aspects


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like costs, time to complete, institutional support, and ambiance’ (OECD, 2007b, p. 2). AHELO’s data is a product which serves multiple clients, including students, educational policy makers and decision-makers and HEIs. Educational systems become fixed as market-driven entities in need of output and production data (Ball, 2000, 2012).


Conclusion In this article, we demonstrate that the OECD uses two key representational practices of classifying and organizing, and marking to represent HE students as objects of learning and as consumer–investor subjects. These practices fix and circulate the meaning of ‘students’ as usable for AHELO. Drawing on Hall’s theory of representation, we show how international student assessment development does not merely assess skills or knowledge, but actively constructs and communicates meanings (of ‘students’, ‘learning’ and so on) that further the interests of a knowledge production mill like the OECD. While tests are a useful and expedient tool for measuring student competencies (if imperfectly), we are interested in the politics and processes of representation that underlie the authority and legitimacy of these tools. This adds new perspective to existing critiques of the outcomes and purposes of these international tests. We show how international testing processes produce, fix and disseminate a shared cultural meaning of ‘students’ that circumscribes who they are (e.g., consumer–investor subjects), what they are like (e.g., passive learners) and how they learn (e.g., subject-oriented learners). Our analysis foregrounds how the OECD makes sense of and manages ‘students’ in its representational practices, and highlights the ‘how to’ side of the OECD’s epistemological governance (Sellar & Lingard, 2013) embedded in its international testing production processes. Amid an ongoing debate among policy makers, HEIs, students and the media, about the ways in which students are perceived and their role in HE (Naidoo & Jamieson, 2005; Tight, 2013; Williams, 2012), this analysis is timely. Students have increasingly become objects of policy intervention because they are cast as primary agents in re-engineering society through civic engagement and economic development (see Kanter, 2012; Richardson & Coates, 2014; Tight, 2013). Perceptions and assumptions about ‘students’ in global policy circles has potential consequences for the purpose of learning, the content of curricula and instructional strategies (Lattuca & Stark, 2009; Tagg, 2003). Hall’s framework helps us to unpack taken for granted representational techniques used to construct usable representations of students, illuminating how a global actor like the OECD can inform perceptions about students and learning. However, the production of meaning is not static: meaning shifts from one historical setting to another and meaning is contextual. Hall’s theory of representation suggests that there is, ‘absolutely no escape from contestation over meaning’ (Hall, 1997b, p. 18). Even as the meanings of ‘students’ are fixed by the OECD’s AHELO initiative in its own interest, representations can be subverted. As critical cultural studies scholars, we must dismantle the OECD’s stereotyped student to make room for more diverse representations of the student subject (see Hall, 1997b). Ensuring that meanings are always open is a key strategy in advocating for education that is inclusive of all students. The early stages of international test production are important sites of inquiry for cultural studies scholars interested in debates about representation, power and ‘students’ in the global policy arena.

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Note


1. We want to note that there are limitations to analyzing AHELO and generalizing our findings to all OECD international assessments. AHELO was a feasibility study and was meant to develop a proof of concept. However, due to various issues such as funding, timelines and other OECD member country priorities, the AHELO initiative has not been currently designated as an OECD priority (for more discussions on challenges of developing and implementing AHELO, please see OECD (2012a, 2013a, 2013b; Ewell, 2012). However, despite these limitations, we would argue that international assessment production processes (even potentially failed attempts) are important sites of inquiry to examine representational practices surrounding the question of students. These processes provide a window to knowledge for policy tool production processes that may have occurred in the past (i.e., PISA; see Morgan & Shahjahan, 2014), or may happen in the future.

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