PISA and the globalisation of education: a critical commentary on papers published in AIE special issue 4/2019

Abstract

I congratulate the guest editors, Caro & Kyriakides, (2019), on an interesting collection of papers on PISA; its achievements and possibilities. Some of these articles will serve as useful reference works for future research. As has been the case since the start of PISA in 2000, its implementation and published results have often been controversial and some of this controversy is reflected in these papers. The editors themselves provide a brief summary of each paper and I will not attempt to replicate that. Rather I will focus on how far the papers increase our understanding of what PISA does and how much it contributes to scientific knowledge, and also the extent to which each paper's authors address some of the broad questions of validity and impact. I will start by offering critical comments on each paper and then provide a general review that will attempt to evaluate the global role that PISA continues to play.

Lp Loss Functions in Invariance Alignment and Haberman Linking with Few or Many Groups

“…If noninvariant items had not been adequately handled by allowing some group-specific unique item parameters, biased comparisons would follow [178]. As mentioned by researcher Harvey Goldstein, there is an inherent circularity in such an argument [179] because data alone cannot choose an approach that provides unbiased estimates.…”