Data have always been important features of teaching and learning and they are pervasive within education: School exams evaluate pupils; achievement tests measure and select students for higher education, school performance studies such as PISA measure and compare whole educational systems. With the ever growing use of information and communication technologies to support the organisation of learning and teaching new devices for monitoring, evaluating, and ranking the performance of individual learners and of educational institutions/systems have become available. Within the educational context, more data and more heterogeneous data are being generated—deliberately—for monitoring, surveillance or evaluation purposes but also—automatically—through routine operations of digital devices and systems (Selwyn 2015: 65). Schools are being constructed as ‘data platforms’ in which ‘a wide range of data tracking, sensing and analytics technologies are being mobilised’ (Williamson 2015: 134). This datafication is just one of the transformational trends of deep mediatisation (Couldry & Hepp, 2016). The potential consequences are ambivalent. For the field of education, we discuss some of these ambivalences with respect to (1) new options for participation, (2) a data literacy divide, (3) spatial extensions of communication and shifting of translocal interrelations, (4) a disguise of agency through software systems and (5) options for surveillance. These consequences become articulated through data practices of different actors (e.g. teachers, school administrators, parents, pupils) following the pupil life cycle from school choice, teaching and learning to certification and transition. Based on examples from Germany and the UK, we will discuss such data practices as ‘material-discursive practices’ (Barad 2007) that shape and reconfigure the organisation of learning. The focus is on educational information infrastructures which connect actors and configure associations across the different aggregation levels of assessment, meaning- and decision-making.

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