ABSTRACT

The article seeks to refine two central concepts in scholarly accounts of national policy responses to international data: ‘selectivity’ and ‘instrumentalisation’. It does so by broadening, firstly, the empirical focus of research to include forms of international data other than the performance data of global learning metrics and international large-scale assessments, and secondly, its case-studies focus to embrace the Republic of Cyprus as an understudied and uniquely situated case within international power structures, but mostly, by reimagining the national policymaker as a postmodern subjectivity rather than a sovereign, fully cogitative and conscious individual. From this theoretical point of view, selectivity is conceptualised as an unintended consequence of the ambivalent attitudes of policymakers towards comparison and numbers, while instrumentalisation as a frequently problematic and ambiguous praxis. To test these two arguments, the article analyses why and how and to what extent statistical averages of teaching time allocations to curriculum subjects from EU and OECD countries are valued and integrated into the 2015 school timetables reform initiative of the Ministry of Education and Culture in Cyprus.

摘要

本文试图提炼关于国家政策应对国际数据的学术描述中的两个核心概念：“选择性”和“工具化”。首先，它扩大了研究的实证重点，以包括全球学习指标和国际大规模评估的绩效数据以外的国际数据形式，其次，它的案例研究重点将塞浦路斯共和国作为这是一个在国际权力结构中未被充分研究且处于独特地位的案例，但主要是通过将国家决策者重新想象为后现代主体性而不是主权、充分思考和有意识的个人。从这个理论的角度来看，选择性被概念化为政策制定者对比较和数字的矛盾态度的意外结果，而工具化是一种经常出现问题和模棱两可的实践。为了验证这两个论点，本文分析了为什么以及如何以及在多大程度上重视欧盟和经合组织国家课程科目的教学时间分配的统计平均值，并将其纳入塞浦路斯教育和文化部的 2015 年学校时间表改革倡议。 .