Abstract
This article analyses the rise of software systems in education governance, focusing on digital methods in the collection, calculation and circulation of educational data. It examines how software-mediated methods intervene in the ways educational institutions and actors are seen, known and acted upon through an analysis of the methodological complex of Pearson Education’s Learning Curve data-bank and its Center for Digital Data, Analytics and Adaptive Learning. This calls for critical attention to the ‘social life’ of its methods in terms of their historical, technical and methodological provenance; their affordances to generate data for circulation within the institutional circuitry of Pearson and to its wider social networks; their capacity to configure research users’ interpretations; and their generativity to produce the knowledge to influence education policy decisions and pedagogic practices. The purpose of the article is to critically survey the digital methods being mobilized by Pearson to generate educational data, and to examine how its methodological complex acts to produce a new data-based knowledge infrastructure for education. The consequence of this shift to data-based forms of digital education governance by Pearson is a challenge to the legitimacy of the social sciences in the theorization and understanding of learning, and its displacement to the authority of the data sciences.
Highlights
This article analyses the rise of software systems in education governance, focusing on digital methods in the collection, calculation and circulation of educational data
Its high-profile personnel, such as Michael Barber, give Pearson policy credibility and leverage, whilst its presence in the field of educational data science through John Behrens positions it at the forefront of an emerging academic field of methodological inquiry and discovery
This article has surveyed key components of the methodological complex Pearson is inserting into the policy cycle—as well as into pedagogic practice—and explored the social life of its methods to underline its capacity to produce the data, analyses and knowledge required for the soft governance of education
Summary
This article analyses the rise of software systems in education governance, focusing on digital methods in the collection, calculation and circulation of educational data It examines how software-mediated methods intervene in the ways educational institutions and actors are seen, known and acted upon through an analysis of the methodological complex of Pearson Education’s Learning Curve data-bank and its Center for Digital Data, Analytics and Adaptive Learning. These are significant methodological accomplishments, and this article interrogates the ‘social life of methods’ (Savage, 2013) deployed by Pearson—the provenance of such methods, and the ways they are inscribed with particular values and assumptions that shape the insights they generate The consequence of this shift to data-based methods of ‘digital education governance’ (Williamson, 2015) by Pearson is a displacement of the legitimacy of the social sciences in the theorization and understanding of learning to the authority of the data sciences. The central aim of the article is to trace the consequences emerging from the digital methods that Pearson is employing in the classification and modelling of learning for the ways in which education might be governed
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