A further brief response from Mary Hilton to: ‘Measuring standards in primary English: the validity of PIRLS—a response to Mary Hilton’ by Chris Whetton, Liz Twist and Marian Sainsbury

Abstract

I have been invited to reply to this response to my article of December 2006 in this journal. This response can only be a summary of some of my findings and a reiteration, in very truncated form, of my arguments. I would refer any interested reader back to my original extended review of the PIRLS project as it was there that I laid out my full critique. It must be first pointed out that my extended critique of the PIRLS project is not one of the detailed technical and statistical procedures carried out by international teams of experts and psychometricians, of which these members of the British National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) can be numbered (Whetton et al., above). Rather, I focus on their ability to understand what is culturally at stake within the very complex decisions that were, at some level, driven by a need to establish a necessary consensus between participating nations in producing and using a common measurement instrument. I also express doubts about the way that it actually functioned in England, and the ways its results entered a charged highstakes political agenda around the testing and success of English children. I also point to the larger issue of subtle cultural hegemony involved in this kind of international survey where richer nations apparently do much better on what is claimed to be a context-free measurement. Although well funded and extensive, the statistical PIRLS project raises enormous doubts about the validity of attempting to test large numbers of young children of an approximate age group with approximate years of school experience in a huge range of very different, economic, social, and