This presentation is concerned with how the numerical data created through international assessments are translated into policy and practice. It draws on recent studies from Canada and a variety of European countries (including France, Denmark and the UK (Cort et al 2014; Darville, 2014; Pinsent-Johnson forthcoming) which focus especially on the OECD’s International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the latest adult skills survey, the Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) (Schleicher, 2008). Analysis of these studies reveals the unpredictabilities of the diffusion process, in which test results may be ignored or taken up beyond their range of power in ways that were never intended by the test-designers. Such policy outcomes pose dilemmas for those charged with incorporating them into pedagogical practice. It discusses how the policy problems constructed through international surveys are transformed into public issues and policy solutions. It looks at processes of policy borrowing and the motivations that lie behind a country’s choice to participate in international literacy surveys (Addey, 2014; Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow, 2011) It shows how the circulation of findings through the mass and social media and a widespread lack of critical engagement with numbers all contribute to national outcomes. Despite the active efforts of the OECD to mobilize media responses and to guide public interpretation of the findings in each national case, the national accounts and policies that are assembled depend not only on the test results but on their “fit” with existing cultural preoccupations, fears and debates how countries view themselves in relation to others.

Addey (2014) Addey, C. (2014). Why do countries join international literacy assessments? An Actor-Network Theory analysis with cases studies from Lao PDR and Mongolia. School of Education and Lifelong Learning. Norwich, University of East Anglia. Ph.D. Cort, Pia, Larson, A. and Mariager-Anderson, K. (2014) Adult Literacy Policy in Denmark – the Discursive Effects of PIAAC. Paper presented at the ECER Annual Conference in Porto 5th September 2014. Darville (2014) Literacy Work and the Adult Literacy Regime in Alison I. Griffith and Dorothy E. Smith (eds) Under New Public Management: Institutional Ethnographies of Changing Frontline Work. University of Toronto Press. Pinsent-Johnson,C. (forthcoming) From an International Adult Literacy Assessment to the Classroom: How Test Development Methods are Transposed into Pedagogy. Hamilton M., Maddox B., Addey, C. (2015): Literacy as Numbers: Researching the Politics and Practices of International Literacy Assessment. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Chapter 12 Schleicher, A. (2008). PIAAC: A new strategy for assessing adult competencies. International Review of Education, 54(5-6), 627-650. Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow (2011) Steiner-Khamsi, G, and Waldow, F. (eds) 2011 Policy Borrowing and Lending in Education. Routledge.