This award is for the course, Social Analysis of International Large-Scale Assessments (ITSF 5035), which Dr. Pizmony-Levy developed and taught almost every year since 2014. Read more about his innovative course below. 

 

The past two decades saw an immense growth in international large‐scale assessments (ILSAs), such as TIMSS, PIRLS, and PISA. International organizations administer international assessments on a regular basis and a growing number of countries take part in these assessments. Students in the field of comparative and international education encounter ILSAs in different parts of the curriculum, including survey classes (e.g., individual sessions in “comparative education”), research methods classes, and quantitative data analysis. In most cases, the discussion about ILSAs is “splintered” where students receive brief exposure to specific assessment (usually PISA) and/or use the rich datasets that are produced by ILSAs.

To provide students with a more holistic perspective on ILSAs, I developed a graduate‐level class titled “Social Analysis of International Assessments”. This class introduces students to different aspects of ILSAs, including the history of this educational movement, motivations for country participation, methods and critiques, comparison of different types of assessments (e.g., IEA vs. OECD), politics of using and abusing ranking, and the extent to which stakeholders engage with ILSAs (e.g., policy makers, general public, scholars, etc.). Rather than asking students to write a final paper, I designed different assignments that help students to (a) explore “hands on” different aspects of ILSAs (e.g., media analysis) and (b) develop different types of skills (e.g., content analysis, writing a policy memo). Taken together, the assigned materials, lectures, class discussion, and assignments provide students with a holistic perspective on ILSAs, a social phenomenon that is both central and often taken‐for‐granted in our field.

 

Professor Pizmony-Levy would like readers to know how much this course is a collective effort. The course benefited from wonderful suggestions and feedback from Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Nancy Green Saraisky, and Katie Conway. In addition, the course is improved every year thanks to the hard work of my Teaching Assistants - Zi (Grace) Hu and Erika Kessler.

 

Check out the following links and learn more about students' work inspired from the class below: