The OECD’s ‘Well-being 2030’ agenda: how PISA's affective turn gets lost in translation

Abstract

<p>Well-being 2030 has become the latest rationale for the OECD’s education work. This vision has given rise to new assessments of student well-being beginning with PISA 2015. The OECD, recognising the problems of PISA 2015, conceptualised a wider student well-being construct in PISA 2018, and attempted to measure ‘students’ feelings’. However, analyses of the OECD’s affective turn reveal major problems remain. Our critique is empirically underpinned by an innovative analytical strategy: comparing PISA 2018 student questionnaire translations across different ‘economies’ that use the same written language (China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan). Our analyses confirm that the OECD imagines a cultural and context-free world, one in which translation and measurements are simply technical problems to be engineered, rather than deeper ‘problems’ of worldviews that require attunement. To encourage the OECD to recognise these differences in its future assessments, we offer starting points from recent research in cultural psychology.<br></p>

“福祉2030”已成为经合组织教育工作的最新理念。这一理念催生了自PISA 2015起新的学生福祉测评。认识到此项测评中的问题后，经合组织在PISA 2018中提出更宽泛的学生福祉概念，并尝试测量“学生的情感”。然而，对经合组织情感转向的分析表明，主要问题依然存在。我们的批评以一种创新性的分析策略为实证基础，即对使用相同书面语言的不同“经济体”（中国大陆、香港、澳门和台湾）的PISA 2018学生问卷翻译进行比较分析。我们的分析证实，经合组织设想了一个无关文化和语境的世界，其中，翻译和测量仅仅是需要被设计的技术问题，而不是需调整的更深层次的世界观“问题”。为鼓励经合组织在未来的测评中认识到这些差异，我们从文化心理学的最新研究中提供一些启示。