Main scientific results
1. The ILSAINC mapped the contractors involved in ILSAs between 1990 and 2020. The project implementation included the creation of visual mappings of all the OECD and IEA ILSA contractors between 1990 and 2020.
3. The ILSAINC explains why contractors compete for cut-even or loss contracts. Drawing on business studies, the ILSAINC classified and analysed the reasons why contractors seek to obtain and implement ILSA contracts. These relate to: developing improved or new products and processes, gaining access to networks, managing human capital, and creating direct business opportunities. In particular, ILSAs contracts are sought for the opportunity to develop and test new methodologies, learn about new assessment ideas, and carry out research. ILSAs are valued in terms of the network capital they provide, especially since they give access to governments as potential clients all around the world. ILSA contracts provide contractors with an international halo of credibility and are strategic in terms of opening up new markets and acquiring big contracts. The study of ILSA contracts identifies rationales that further the categories described in business studies by adding a fifth category of individual rationales. This latter category shows that contractors use ILSA contracts to further professional aspirations, lifestyles, and emotional bonds.
4. The ILSAINC demonstrated that ILSAs are presented as innovative, whilst at the same time, they are not innovative in practice. Although ILSAs are described as the golden standard in education assessment by the OECD, the IEA, and contractors, in practice, there is little space for innovation. While ILSAs are described as a methodological playground to test new theories and learn new assessment ideas, contractors ‘copy and paste’ their previous work because of economic limitations and lack of shared agreement. In sum, there is a gap between the ILSA innovation rhetoric and innovation in practice.
5. The ILSAINC analysed how ILSA contracting emerged and evolved: The ILSAINC findings captured how a community of practice at the IEA carried out the first ILSAs through personal networks and good will. This small network of actors developed social and cultural capitals (including trust) that allowed them to obtain contracts once substantial funding became available for ILSAs. The availability of funding and growing interest in the outcomes of ILSAs led to the first struggles in this space. A split in the IEA community emerged: this resulted in the birth of PISA, the most influential ILSA. The space was now populated by competing ILSAs and competing contractors, with the IEA openly relying on relationships of trust whilst the OECD used a global tendering process to conceal interpersonal and inter-organizational struggles.
6. The emergence of a global assessment market in education. Drawing on market sociology to analyse the interrelations of institutions, networks, and cognition in ILSA contracting, the project demonstrates how the OECD has stimulated the emergence of a global assessment market in education.
7. The ILSAINC contributed evidence on how International Organizations make knowledge, in particular through the selection of experts and their management. The OECD acts as a boundary organization, coordinating and easing connections among hundreds of experts, in the making of comparative knowledge about learning outcomes through PISA. What emerges is that through the management of hundreds of experts (including the contractors) through institutional boundary practices, the PISA Secretariat takes back decision-making power to steer the making of knowledge.
8. Ultimately, the ILSAINC demonstrates that the ILSA market was, and remains, a small market with tall walls and poor profit. Despite this, it is increasingly non-competitive, desirable, and exclusive. The project suggests that the rationales and dynamics in the ILSA market may not be in the best interest of education. Working in education, and in light of the far-reaching policy implications of international large-scale assessments, means all actors involved must be committed to ensuring the education they are making—the worlds they are bringing into being—are building more just and sustainable societies.
