SEARCH PUBLICATION

In the education sector, media outlets have been increasingly active
in reporting on standardized testing. The purpose of this paper is to
identify the most recurrent discursive frames used by the
Norwegian regional and local press when informing their readers
about national standardized testing, and to explore whether
differences over time and across geographical localities exist in
the pervasiveness of frames. Our analysis is guided by framing
theory, and builds on a corpus of 3,046 articles that focus on
national testing, published by 155 Norwegian regional and local
newspapers between 2004 and 2018. The analysis identifies four
different discursive frames within Norwegian press coverage,
namely the frame of ‘performance’, ‘transparency and
empowerment’, ‘misinterpretation and misuse’, and ‘criticism’.
The four frames convey highly distinct causal and normative
beliefs and realities about national standardized testing. While
the dominance of the frames varies over time and across
Norwegian counties, the frame of ‘performance’ is increasingly
pervasive, something that potentially contributes to naturalize
performative-oriented reporting and competition in education.
The study highlights the importance of systematic media analyses
to identify circulating principle beliefs on education, and of not
limiting research to national newspapers in order to grasp
geographical variation in media coverage.
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Full list of newspaper articles analyzed in Camphuijsen and Levatino (2021).
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This note describes the methodology behind the design of the REFORMED Survey questionnaires. The Survey constitutes one of the main pillars of REFORMED RS2 which is aimed at exploring the intricate relationship between SAWA policies, contextual contingencies and policy enactment dynamics. The aim of this note is essentially twofold. On the one hand, it provides detailed information on the key concepts used in RS2 as well as the theoretical underpinnings and content of the questionnaires. On the other hand, it presents a detailed overview of the methodological steps followed to conceive and develop them. The information contained in this note is relevant for those researchers who want to use the data collected through the REFORMED Survey. It also provides useful methodological insights that can be valuable for those who want to undertake similar research endeavours.
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In recent decades, performance-based accountability (PBA) has become an increasingly popular policy instrument to ensure educational actors are responsive to and assume responsibility for achieving centrally defined learning goals. Nonetheless, studies report mixed results with regard to the impact of PBA on schools’ internal affairs and instructional practices. With the aim of contributing to the understanding of the social mechanisms and processes that induce particular school responses, this paper reports on a study that examines how Norwegian principals perceive, interpret, and translate accountability demands. The
analysis is guided by the policy enactment perspective and the sociological concept of “reactivity”, and relies on 23 in-depth interviews with primary school principals in nine urban municipalities in Norway. The findings highlight three distinct response patterns in how principals perceive, interpret, and translate PBA demands: alignment, balancing multiple purposes, and symbolic responses. The study simultaneously shows how different manifestations of two social mechanisms form important explanatory factors to understand principals’ varying responses, while it is highlighted how the mechanisms are more likely to operate under particular conditions, which relate both to principals’ trajectories and views on education, and to school-specific characteristics and the local accountability regime. The study contributes to the accountability literature by showing how, even in the relative absence of material consequences and low levels of marketization, standardized testing and PBA can drive behavioral change, by reframing norms of good educational practice and by affecting how educators make sense of core aspects of their work.
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