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Psychodata: disassembling the psychological, economic, and statistical infrastructure of ‘social-emotional learning’
Abstract
Psychology and economics are powerful sources of expert knowledge in contemporary governance. Social and emotional learning (SEL) is becoming a priority in education policy in many parts of the world. Based on the enumeration of students’ ‘noncognitive’ skills, SEL consists of a ‘psycho-economic’ combination of psychometrics with economic analysis, and is producing novel forms of statistical ‘psychodata’ about students. Constituted by an expanding infrastructure of technologies, metrics, people, money and policies, SEL has travelled transnationally through the advocacy of psychologists, economists, and behavioural scientists, with support from think tank coalitions, philanthropies, software companies, investment schemes, and international organizations. The article examines the emerging SEL infrastructure, identifying how psychological and economics experts are producing policy-relevant scientific knowledge and statistical psychodata to influence the direction of SEL policies. It examines how the OECD Study on Social and Emotional Skills, a large-scale computer-based assessment, makes ‘personality’ an international focus for policy intervention and ‘human capital’ formation, thereby translating measurable socio-emotional indicators into predicted socio-economic outcomes. The SEL measurement infrastructure instantiates psychological governance within education, one underpinned by a political rationality in which society is measured effectively through scientific fact-finding and subjects are managed affectively through psychological intervention.
... Social-emotional skills can also serve the operationalization of adaptive readiness. Research, interventions, and policies targeting social-emotional skills have rapidly expanded in contemporary society, given its recognized importance in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous educational and work environments [17]. As various terminologies and perspectives can be found in the literature, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has advanced in an international and interdisciplinary efforts to consensually reach a definition and measure of social-emotional skills. ...
... As for practice, career education programs might be particularly useful to promote not only career competencies (e.g., career exploration, planning), but also personal and social competencies (namely social-emotional skills) that are jointly required to face the challenges of the current society [13,14,20,22,42]. By fostering these competencies, practitioners might help to better prepare students to adapt to life transitions [17,20,21,23], besides sustaining their engagement in school, which is critical for academic success [34,37]. These integrative efforts are aligned with a holistic and comprehensive view of the individuals [42] and can ultimately contribute to support their mental health and psychosocial adjustment [13,17,22,31,33], particularly in a challenging period such as those of implementing a career choice and starting high school. ...
... By fostering these competencies, practitioners might help to better prepare students to adapt to life transitions [17,20,21,23], besides sustaining their engagement in school, which is critical for academic success [34,37]. These integrative efforts are aligned with a holistic and comprehensive view of the individuals [42] and can ultimately contribute to support their mental health and psychosocial adjustment [13,17,22,31,33], particularly in a challenging period such as those of implementing a career choice and starting high school. ...
The transition to the first year of high school constitutes a critical moment because it corresponds to the implementation of a career choice, which can impact students’ satisfaction and psychosocial adjustment. The career construction model of adaptation holds potential to explain how students adapt to high school, by suggesting linkages among adaptive readiness, resources, responses, and results. However, research applying the career construction model to school transitions, combining social-emotional, career, and academic variables is still needed. This study explores the roles that social-emotional skills (an indicator of adaptive readiness) and career adaptability (an indicator of adaptability resources) play in explaining first-year high school students’ agentic school engagement (an indicator of adapting responses). Measures of social-emotional skills, career adaptability, and school engagement were completed by 136 students (63.2% girls; M age = 15.68). Results from the hierarchical linear regression analysis suggest that social-emotional skills and career adaptability explain 32% of the variance and significantly contribute to explaining agentic school engagement. These findings seem illustrative of the potential of the career construction model of adaptation to deepen knowledge and understanding about the transition to high school and the implementation of career choices. Aligned with the literature, this study supports the calls for integrative psychological practices that acknowledge social-emotional, career, and academic variables when fostering students’ psychosocial adjustment.
... However, the focus on emotion often deemphasizes its role in producing specific economic subjectivities and vice versa. Exceptions that specifically examine the feeling body, economic subjectivity, and biopolitical production in educational studies exist (Lewis & Kahn, 2010;Sellar & Zipin, 2019;Williamson, 2019). For example, when critiquing the habit to misperceive certain bodies as monstrous, Lewis and Kahn (2010) refer to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's work to foreground the necessity of connecting the affective with capitalism: 'Any politics of affect today simply must confront the growing reality of transnational capitalism that, as Hardt and Negri argue (2000, 2004, 2009, is itself predicated on an immaterial, affective economy ' (p. ...
... For a study, how does the amount of emotion become measured? Analyzing the work by SEL experts, Ben Williamson (2019) notes that these experts 'embody a political economy in which human psychological qualities are translated into psychometric data as quantitative measures of potential economic value (human capital), and behavioural data has become a source for governmental "nudging" and control' (p. 8). ...
... Tying into biopolitics and affective labor, Williamson speaks of the evolving infrastructure being developed in order to assess and manage the emerging fount of affective labor. A diverse group of global actors including governments, markets, philanthropic organizations, and international economic organizations such as the OECD develops the new infrastructures (Williamson, 2019). ...
... In addition to enhancing economic productivity and academic success, SEL is increasingly viewed as having a vital role to play in the pursuit of social and global justice, with 'skills' such as mindfulness, empathy and compassion being touted as key to achieving global citizenship, and its alignment with the SDGs has been interpreted as a superficial yet strategic move to position itself as the organisation best placed to monitor progress toward SDG targets (e.g., Auld and Morris 2019; 2021; Engel, Rutkowski and Thompson 2019; Rappleye et al. 2020, 272;Williamson 2021). Notwithstanding the widely acknowledged difficulties the OECD's assessment of global competencies, this influential policy actor's newfound interest in the non-cognitive aspects of learning is likely to amplify the policy prioritisation of SEL over the next decade (Engel, Rutkowski and Thompson 2019). ...
... A complex SEL 'infrastructure,'-comprising academic 'gurus,' celebrities, think tank coalitions, entrepreneurs, philanthropic funders, software companies, investment marketplace and investment opportunity has emerged within an increasingly corporatist global governance regime, whereby concerns about market reach and profit-accumulation now influence the content, delivery and assessment of learning in education systems worldwide (Carney and Klerides 2020;Williamson 2021). With technological advancements radically enhancing the scalability and measurability of SEL, this new emotional paradigm is ideally suited to philanthropy's 'predisposition to quick, short term, "silver bullet" solutions to meet the "grand challenges" of development; to do more with less; and crucially, to insert the market in the public sphere' (Srivastara and Baur 2016, 437). ...
... international organisations-has played a major role in the emergence of a global consensus about the importance of SEL in addressing problems as varied and complex as behavioural problems, educational underachievement, bullying, conflict, violent extremism and climate change(Williamson 2021;Williamson and Piattoeva 2019). The scientific basis and perceived 'objectivity' of SEL research-which is highly visible (on brain scans), quantifiable, policy-relevant and easily translatable into curricular and programmatic intervention-has enabled a relatively small number of academics to wield considerable power over the direction of global educational policy, programming and practice(Williamson 2021, 135). ...
This article analyses UNESCO’s advocacy of social-emotional learning (SEL) as key to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—particularly SDG target 4.7. It interrogates the agency’s growing emphasis on digital SEL and conscious ‘whole brain’ approaches as part of a wider neuroliberal turn towards the behavioural, psychological and neurological sciences and considers their implications for UNESCO’s status as the ‘conscience of humanity.’ It argues that ‘SEL for SDGs’ operates as a ‘flag of convenience’ hoisted by UNESCO to garner legitimacy in a global governance landscape increasingly shaped by private/corporate interests, new (tech-based) philanthropy, and neoliberal policies and funding infrastructures. It demonstrates how the privileging of biological or neuropsychological explanations for complex global problems is reconfiguring UNESCO’s global citizenship work towards a depoliticised, individualistic and neuroliberally-inflected ‘conscious human brain’ response to complex societal challenges which forestalls political dialogue and undermines an appreciation of their material and economic determinants.
... Intelligent machines that automatically sense, gauge, learn, and interact with human emotion are quickly becoming a permanent feature of modern life [1,2] and institutional practice [3]. Known by its commercial moniker, emotional AI, this emerging layer of the smart city traces back to the early 1990s and the pioneering research of Rosalind Picard [4] in the field of affective computing. ...
... Next, we describe the research design of our study including the hypotheses formation, data collection, and analysis process. Finally, we discuss the implications of the analysis results for ensuring human-centric oversight [1,2], and institutional use [3]. How should the governance and design of these technologies unfold? ...
... It demonstrates that the effects of all Gen Z sociodemographic factors remain consistent across models. Fig. 7 shows flawed democracy (a_Pol_Regime [3] 's mean 1.79; sd = 0.24) and South East Asia (a_Region [6]'s mean = 1.80; sd = 0.28) presented the weakest correlation with a positive attitude toward nonconscious data harvest by the public sector, similar to the case of the private sector (lending some support for H6 and H7). ...
This paper examines technological acceptance for automated emotion-sensing devices and non-conscious data collection (NCDC). We argue that conventional 20th century scholarship of human-machine relations is ill-equipped in the age of intelligent machines that sense, monitor, and tracks human sentiment, emotion, and feeling. We conduct a regression analysis on a dataset of 1015 Generation Z student respondents (age 18–27) from 48 countries and 8 regions worldwide using the Bayesian Hamiltonian Monte Carlo approach. The empirical results highlight the significance of sociocultural factors that influence technological acceptance by this specific generational demographic. Our findings also demonstrate the advantage but also inherent limitation of traditional theories such as Davis's “Technological Acceptance Model” in accounting for of cross-cultural factors such as religions and regions, given the transfer of new technologies across borders. Moreover, our findings highlight important governance and design implications that need to be addressed to ensure that emotional AI systems and devices serve the best interests of individuals and societies.
... Some providers adopt a traditional, for-profit business model and therefore benefit greatly from widespread adoption of SEL products, particularly in the education technology sector (Williamson, 2021). Other market players are mission-driven, non-profit organizations who funnel profits back into product development and client support, although there is still accumulation of financial capital and participation in industrialized processes to continue their work (INCITE! ...
... Still other providers offer products and services for free and support their work with funding from foundations or philanthropists (Williamson, 2021). This model may seem appealing, but from where are the funds derived that enable free SEL products and services? ...
Social and emotional learning (SEL) has seen tremendous growth since its inception over 25 years ago. Despite now being in an era of widespread support, SEL is critiqued for its cultural appropriateness and role in sustaining the hegemony of Western normativity. As emerging researchers in this field, we find it important to engage with our work and its criticisms. Thus, the intent of this conceptual paper is to disrupt and complicate understandings of SEL. First, we review extant critiques of SEL. Then, we offer observations on SEL theory and influences of capitalism to expand the conversation. We hope our initial discussions encourage others to explore and contribute their own critical analyses of SEL to reimagine sociality, emotionality, and learning.
... The OECD's conceptualisation of global competencies has been heavily criticised for undermining the wider UN conception of global citizenship, and its alignment with the SDGs has been interpreted as a superficial yet strategic move to position itself as the organisation best placed to monitor progress towards SDG targets (e.g. Morris 2019, 2021;Engel, Rutkowski, and Thompson 2019;Rappleye et al. 2020;Williamson 2021). Notwithstanding the widely acknowledged difficulties of the OECD's assessment of global competencies, this influential policy actor's newfound interest in the non-cognitive aspects of learning is likely to amplify the policy prioritisation of SEL over the next decade (Engel, Rutkowski, and Thompson 2019). ...
... Cefai et al. 2018;Singh and Duraiappah 2020;Chernyshenko, Kankaraš, and Drasgow 2018;Guerra, Modecki, and Cunningham 2014;GPE 2020;UNICEF 2019;WEF 2016). SEL's positioning as both a technology-driven policy "solution" to long-standing educational problems and as a marketplace and investment opportunity has emerged within an increasingly corporatist global governance regime, whereby concerns about market reach and profit-accumulation now influence the content, delivery and assessment of learning in education systems worldwide (Carney and Klerides 2020;Williamson 2021). With technological advancements radically enhancing the scalability and measurability of SEL, this new emotional paradigm is ideally suited to philanthropy's "predisposition to quick, short term, 'silver bullet' solutions to meet the 'grand challenges' of development; to do more with less; and crucially, to insert the market in the public sphere" (Srivastava and Baur 2016, 437). ...
This article analyses UNESCO's advocacy of social-emotional learning (SEL) as key to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)-particularly SDG target 4.7. It interrogates the agency's growing emphasis on digital SEL and conscious "whole brain" approaches as part of a wider neuroliberal turn towards the behavioural, psychological and neurological sciences and considers their implications for UNESCO's status as the "conscience of humanity ." It argues that "SEL for SDGs" operates as a "flag of convenience" hoisted by UNESCO to garner legitimacy in a global governance landscape increasingly shaped by private/corporate interests, new (tech-based) philanthropy, and neoliberal policies and funding infrastructures. It demonstrates how the privileging of biological and neuropsychological explanations for complex global problems is reconfiguring UNESCO's global citizenship work towards a depoliticised, individualistic and neuroliberally-inflected "con-scious human brain" response to complex societal challenges which forestalls political dialogue and undermines an appreciation of their material and economic determinants.
... Concepts, such as social and emotional learning (SEL), provide scientific evidence on how different personality traits based on ideological underpinnings, are rapidly expanding across contemporary education policies and practices all over the world. SEL consists of a 'psycho-economic' combination of psychometrics with economic analysis aiming to collect statistical data about the individual actor: feelings, personality traits, mindset and other psycho-emotional behaviour-determinants that are expected to contribute economic growth (Williamson, 2021b). ...
... The core focus of the study is to trace individual personality factors that contribute better socio-economic outcomes (Kankaraš, 2017). SEL is one powerful example of how emotions, well-being and behaviour of learning subjects are translated into 'objective and measurable' formation, and how measurement of humans' psychological attributes is seen as integral to economic forecasting and political management of populations (Davies, 2018;Williamson, 2021b). ...
Managing the future has become one of the major focuses of global governance in education. In its current mode, education seems unable to answer the needs and interests of the market and future megatrends, such as globalisation and digitalisation. Calls for precision education to introduce the usage of digital platforms, artificial intelligence in education, and knowledge from the behavioural and life sciences are getting a foothold in widening powerful networks of strengthening global governance and EdTech business. By bringing together some of the emerging changes in education governance, in this article we argue for a new constitution of governance, precision education governance. Precision education governance combines three overlapping and strengthening lines of governance: (i) global governance of education, (ii) marketisation, privatisation and digitalisation, and (iii) behavioural and life sciences as the basis for managing the future education. In the article, we highlight the importance in bringing these so far separately studied lines together to understand how they shape the aims and outcomes of education, knowledge and understanding of human subjectivity more thoroughly than before.
... Concepts, such as social and emotional learning (SEL), provide scientific evidence on how different personality traits based on ideological underpinnings, are rapidly expanding across contemporary education policies and practices all over the world. SEL consists of a 'psycho-economic' combination of psychometrics with economic analysis aiming to collect statistical data about the individual actor: feelings, personality traits, mindset, and other psycho-emotional behaviour-determinants that are expected to contribute economic growth (Williamson, 2021b). ...
... The core focus of the study is to trace individual personality factors that contribute better socio-economic outcomes (Kankaraš, 2017). SEL is one powerful example of how emotions, well-being and behaviour of learning subjects are translated into 'objective and measurable' formation, and how measurement of humans' psychological attributes is seen as integral to economic forecasting and political management of populations (Davies, 2018;Williamson, 2021b). ...
Managing the future has become one of the major focuses of global governance in education. In its current mode, education seems unable to answer the needs and interests of the market and future megatrends, such as globalisation and digitalisation. Calls for precision education to introduce the usage of digital platforms, artificial intelligence in education, and knowledge from the behavioural and life sciences are getting a foothold in widening powerful networks of strengthening global governance and EdTech business. By bringing together some of the emerging changes in education governance, in this paper we argue for a new constitution of governance, precision education governance. Precision education governance combines three overlapping and strengthening lines of governance: i) global governance of education, ii) marketisation, privatisation and digitalisation, and iii) behavioural and life sciences as the basis for managing the future education. In the article, we highlight the importance in bringing these so far separately studied lines together to understand how they shape the aims and outcomes of education, knowledge and understanding of human subjectivity more thoroughly than before.
... We draw on approaches of critical studies of youth and education policy, including those focusing on mental health, that emphasise the power of networks and assemblages of policy production, encompassing governmental organisations, businesses and technologies (e.g. Ball, 2016;McGimpsey et al., 2017;Williamson, 2021). Our study situates HE restructuring as part of a broader dispositif (Foucault, 1980), whose heterogeneous elements contribute to the 'variegated ecology of knowledge and expertise' (Bacevic, 2019: 88) making up universities' mental health policy. ...
... McGimpsey et al. (2017) describe projects for youth 'happiness', 'wellbeing' and 'resilience' promoted by New Labour figures such as Richard Layard and associated think-tanks (The Young Foundation, the New Economics Foundation, New Philanthropy Capital). Williamson (2021) has mapped similarly theoretically underpinned global policy trends around the introduction of 'social and emotional learning' (SEL) curricula in education, supported by philanthropic institutions (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative) and international organisations (OECD, World Bank, UNESCO, World Economic Forum). Driven and validated by psychometric and econometric data to demonstrate 'value for money', SEL has created new profit opportunities for educational technology corporations ranging from global-level conglomerates (e.g. ...
The mental health and well-being of university staff and students in the UK are reported to have seriously deteriorated. Rather than taking this ‘mental health crisis’ at face value, we carry out network and discourse analyses to investigate the policy assemblages (comprising social actors, institutions, technologies, knowledges and discourses) through which the ‘crisis' is addressed. Our analysis shows how knowledges from positive psychology and behavioural economics, disciplinary techniques driven by metrics and data analytics, and growing markets in digital therapeutic technologies work as an ensemble. Together, they instrumentalise mental health, creating motivational ecologies that allow economic agendas to seep through to subjects who are encouraged to monitor and rehabilitate themselves. Mental health’ as a problem for UK universities has come to be largely defined through the outcomes of ‘resilience’ and ‘employability’ and is addressed through markets that enable training, monitoring, measuring and ‘nudging’ students and staff towards these outcomes.
... Osa-alueen kohteena esiintyy yksilöiden psykologiset ominaisuudet, käyttäytymistottumukset ja persoonalliset piirteet.(Mertanen ym., 2021;Williamson, 2021.) Samalla mitattavuus esiintyy keskeisessä roolissa myös sosioemotionaalisessa oppimisessa, kun huomioidaan, miten merkittävään asemaan data psykologisista ominaisuuksista ja inhimillisestä pääomasta työmarkkinoiden kannalta asettuu(Williamson, 2021, s.130).Brunila, Harni, Saari & Ylöstalo (2021) puhuvat terapeuttisesta vallasta, joka valjastaa ihmisen mielen kansallisen kilpailukyvyn ja työkulttuurin tehostamisen välineeksi.Tällöin yksilöille tarjotaan vapaaehtoisuuden kautta omaksuttavia tapoja päästä eitoivotuista tilanteista ja pahoinvoinnista irti tavoitellakseen henkilökohtaisia päämääriä ja tulevaisuuden menestystä korostaen kansalaisten vapautta ja hyvinvointia. ...
Tämän pro gradu- tutkielman aiheena on nuorten koulutuksen yksityistäminen. Aihe pohjaa yhteiskunnan markkinoitumiseen ja kansainvälisten virtausten mukana tuomiin uusliberaaleihin arvoihin osana koulutuspolitiikkaa. Tarkastelen aihetta tutkimalla nuorten koulutukseen toimintansa suuntaavien yksityisten yritysten verkkosivuja. Aikakaudella, jossa koulutus nähdään yhteiskunnan tulevaisuuden tarpeisiin vastaajana ja toisaalta yritysten markkina-alustana, pyrin aineiston pohjalta tarkastelemaan sitä, millaisia sisältöjä yksityiset yritykset nuorten koulutukseen tuovat ja miten yritykset perustelevat toimintansa tarvetta osana koulutusta.
Olen toteuttanut tämän pro-gradu -tutkielman osana Interrupting Future Trajectories of Precision Education Governance (FuturEd) - tutkimushanketta. Olen rajannut tutkimusaineiston tutkimusryhmän keväällä 2021 keräämästä aineistosta, joka piti sisällään 56 Edtech- yritystä ja muita nuorille aikuisille suunnattuja palveluita tarjoavia toimijoita. Valitsin alkuperäisestä aineistosta tutkielman aineisoksi 11 nuorten koulutukseen toimintansa suuntaavaa yksityistä yritystä. Aineiston lukutavassa ja analyysissä olen hyödyntänyt netnografiaa.
Yksityisten yritysten toiminnan perustelut osana nuorten koulutusta näyttäytyvät tutkielman tulosten valossa oppimisen tehokkuuden lisäämisenä, nuorten hyvinvoinnin parantamisena ja tulevaisuuden työelämätaitojen vahvistamisena. Yritykset kertovat tekevänsä oppimisesta helppoa, sujuvaa ja kustannustehokasta. Oppimisesta ja hyvinvoinnista tehdään datan keräämisen avulla mitattavaa, jotta niihin voidaan puuttua ja kohdistaa opetuksen resursseja tehokkaammin. Samalla opettajan työnkuva muuttuu enemmän yritysvalmentajan suuntaan. Yritykset perustelevat toimintaansa myös vahvistamalla nuorilta puuttuvia tulevaisuuden työelämätaitoja, jotta nuorista tulisi työmarkkinoille suuntaavia, joustavia ja tehokkaita yksilöitä. Tutkielma herättää kysymyksiä nuorten koulutuksessa toimivien yksityisten yritysten asemasta yhteiskunnassa ja nuorten elämässä: koulutuksen sisällöt näyttävät aikaisempaan tutkimukseen peilaten lisäävän nuorten itsevastuullista asemaa koulutuksessa
ja työelämään siirtymisessä.
... Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, some cognitive scientists have considered the close connection between brain science and research in computer science and psychology as a turning point in the development of the third generation of cognitive science [7]. In terms of theoretical foundations and practical applications, AI became a separate system in its own right and gradually evolved into a separate branch with the birth of AI-based learning science. ...
The development and innovation of data mining, learning analysis, and artificial intelligence have brought new opportunities to promote the study of learning mechanism in the fields of neuroscience, learning engineering, and precision education. Although learning science has been studied for nearly 40 years, it has not been deeply integrated with artificial intelligence technology at present. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the application research of artificial intelligence (AI)-based learning science. Taking the literature of empirical research of learning science from 2017 to 2022 as a sample, the descriptive results show that foreign researchers focus on using artificial intelligence technology to explore and analyze brain, psychology and biological data, and support the construction of learning environment and the development of personalized learning path. Finally, according to the research results, the article shows the future development trend of AI-based learning science, to provide reference for the construction and development of the research field of AI-based learning science.
... The development of non-cognitive skills in schools has received increasing attention in recent years (Williamson 2021). However, relatively little is known about how best to integrate non-cognitive skills into existing educational frameworks (García 2016;Pineiro 2021). ...
Non-cognitive skills have increasingly been recognised as an important part of holistic education, but more research is needed on how best to ingrate them into existing educational frameworks. This study examined variables critical to the implementation of a non-cognitive skills programme in post-primary schools in Ireland. Teachers (N = 76) were recruited from both mainstream (N = 43) and high-support schools (N = 33) and assessed by means of a cross-sectional survey, on their Readiness, Willingness, and self-perceived Ability (RWA) to implement Ireland’s national ‘Wellbeing Guidelines’. Statistical analyses were conducted to assess the relationships between teachers’ perception of both leader and peer support, and their self-perceived readiness willingness, and ability to implement the wellbeing programme. Our findings suggest a useful optimised pathway – or an ‘RWA framework’ – to inform the implementation of non-cognitive programmes in post-primary schools in Ireland and elsewhere.
... • assess non-cognitive psycho-emotional behavior qualities, such as persistence and grit, initiative and adaptability etc., through ambient intelligence (Stark and Hoey, 2021;Williamson, 2021); and ...
In a societal institution as fundamental as education, when teaching practitioners or researchers apply artificial intelligence in academic processes such as assessments, it is important to study the divide between what may be ethically permissible and not permissible. This study applied a systematic literature mapping methodology to scour extant research, so as to holistically structure the landscape into explicit topical research clusters. Through topic modelling and network analyses, research mapped ten key ethical principles to five research archetypical domains, and reviewed the contribution and intensity of these ethical principles in each thematic domain. The study extended this review, by mapping out ethics programs and activities that can be applied in practice, alongside their relevant underpinning theories. This study provides a comprehensive treatment of this subject matter to date. We hope the findings of this research can provide researchers and practitioners the insights into the application methods of AI in assessments, and in particular, in terms of their intertwined ethical challenges and how these challenges may be addressed, for follow up studies.
... Andreas Schleicher's comment about the 'first class humans' illustrates the current drive towards technology-enhanced learning, 'the collaboration between machines and humans' (OECD 2022), 2 and the emerging embrace of neuro-scientific and social and emotional learning by international organisations that takes the neoliberal individualised learner even further towards a 'robotic view' (Vickers 2022, 14). The above quote represents a post-humanist vision of a human who is forced to learn for survival, competing with robots in a society shaped by the rise of artificial intelligence and automation (Williamson 2021). The emerging post-humanist vision of the future is accompanied by a move towards neurosciences and digitisation, coupled with discourses of crisis, resilience and the 4 th industrial revolution, which represents a case of Orwellian 'doublespeak' as it embellishes the massive loss of jobs due to automation and artificial intelligence. ...
This article argues that contemporary education policies promoted by UNESCO and the OECD are embracing two distinct post-humanist visions, which I call the ‘sustainable futures’ and the ‘techno-solutionist’ strand. I will relate these strands to two conflicting agendas of education after World War II: the humanistic-emancipatory perspective represented by UNESCO, and the ‘economics of education’ movement, which was dominant in the OECD. I argue that comparative education scholars would be well advised to draw on the humanistic and democratic traditions of the field in critically analysing the range of promissory visions and master narratives that have emerged recently which carry de-humanising tendencies and represent a challenge to democracy.
... In recent years, there has been accelerated development in the field of social-emotional learning (SEL) (Mahoney et al., 2020;Williamson, 2021), supporting the development of teachers and students worldwide (Loinaz, 2019;Malhotra et al., 2021;Waajid et al., 2013). The transition to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis led to intensive research in the field (Yang, 2021), regarding the processes involved in remote synchronous and asynchronous learning or a combination of the two (Moorhouse & Wong, 2022). ...
The goal of this paper is to address the questions of how social-emotional learning [SEL] can be incorporated into online learning and what effect such integration can have on students. The COVID-19 outbreak significantly increased the use of online learning at all levels of education. However, research shows that the online learning experience may contribute to students’ feelings of distancing, alienation, and loneliness. The assumption underlying this study was that these negative feelings are not inherent to the online learning experience; rather, they can be avoided by using online-SEL (“O-SEL”) techniques that integrate SEL into online learning processes. This qualitative case study included 42 preservice teachers enrolled in a college of education in Israel, who participated in an online course that employed specific methods for integrating the SEL component. Analysis of students’ reactions to the course revealed that O-SEL not only improved students’ emotional experience but also enhanced their cognitive learning. These findings strongly suggest that models of online learning should include SEL. Additional research may confirm the positive O-SEL effects on students’ experience and achievements. In this context, the current study introduces the concept of “social emotional presence,” which is necessary for learning and development to take place online.
... The effects of education are determined by the characteristics of the individuals who are educated (Ganzach and Gotlibovski, 2014), such as their personalities (Williamson, 2021). Many studies emphasize the significance of personality in entrepreneurship (Ciavarella et al., 2004;Hisrich et al., 2007;Fairlie and Holleran, 2012;Basuki et al., 2021). ...
This study investigates the impact of entrepreneurship education on college students’ entrepreneurial intentions, as well as the moderating effects of personality and family economic status on the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention, respectively. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of college students in Tianjin, China, and analyzed the data of 326 questionnaires containing validated measures. The results show that entrepreneurship education has a positive impact on college students’ entrepreneurial intentions; proactive personality negatively moderates this relationship; and family economic status positively moderates it. However, the moderating effect of narcissistic personality has not been verified. This study is unique and innovative as it brings new insights to this stream of literature by introducing the roles of the personality and family economic status in the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention. Our analysis provides important empirical evidence about the negative moderating effect of proactive personality and the positive moderating effect of family economic status on the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention, introducing insights into the heterogeneity of the effect of entrepreneurship education.
... The OECD thus functions as an arena for policy debates and simultaneously enforces and pushes 'new' ways and new technologies for education with the hope of a better future through accumulating human capital (Centeno 2021;Hof and Bürgi 2021). By maintaining constant research, surveys, global comparisons and building new metrics to evaluate education outcomes and concepts such as wellbeing, the OECD has solidified a particular view of education and policy (Williamson 2021b;Williamson and Piattoeva 2019). This particular view builds upon the premise, where through imagining possible futures, and looking past actions and their consequences can be moulded into persuasive governance of present education polices (Lewis 2018;Decuypere and Simons 2020). ...
The OECD has become a notable predictor of the future needs of society and education. In youth education, the OECD spearheads global strategies, initiatives and recommendations about the curriculum and goals for education. By evoking the sense of 'crisis' in 'traditional education' the OECD functions as a central node of precision education governance, in which so-called best practices of precise, flexible and highly individualised and personalised youth education are disseminated throughout its member states. In the most recent OECD youth strategies and education policy initiatives, we show how the present youth education is governed through evoking various future(s) of youth education. By analysing these predictions and visions discursively, we argue that the future of youth education is approached from both utopian and dystopian predictions by the OECD, and this works as a premise for arranging present and future youth education in a highly targeted and individualised manner. We argue, that the future visions drawn up by the OECD are an example of precision education governance, where the future education is hyper-individualised, arranged by cooperation of public and private sector, and where the goals and contents of education follow global recommendations and 'best practices'.
... In addition, physical therapy such as hypnosis and suggestion therapy are also available [21]. If the clinical symptoms are severe and persist without relief from severe suicidal behavior, twitch-free electroconvulsive therapy can be used [22]. ...
In this paper, a semantic analysis approach to children’s emotional disorder intervention and education is thoroughly analyzed and discussed, and a corresponding educational system is designed for application in real life. This paper acquires video data by deploying a common camera acquisition and transforms, annotates, frames, and processes the data with the help of feature engineering methods. In addition, this paper proposes a fine-grained action decomposition strategy to solve the problem of extreme imbalance in the dataset to improve the performance of the model and proposes an iterative sampling data fusion strategy, which aims to integrate and fuse data from multiple sources to make them more effective and further improve the robustness and generalization ability of the model. Since it is difficult for families to improve the emotional management skills of migrant children, and it is also difficult to obtain professional help and support from the community or schools, it is important to take advantage of the professional strengths of social work to provide professional support for migrant children and their families. From the perspective of theoretical research, most of the existing studies focus on individual migrant children and cannot give global guidance from the perspective of the family system. The comparison results show that T-SVR trained using data from all subjects outperforms the inductive method based on individual training of trainees, validating the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive emotion recognition model. Therefore, from the perspective of system integration, it is important to explore social work interventions to improve the emotional management skills of migrant children. The system network structure design is determined according to the actual situation; then from the system requirements, the system is abstracted with the help of UML entity-relationship diagram, and the database table design is completed; so far, the overall system can be divided into independent functional modules, and the boundaries of each module and the participating roles are gradually clarified, and the detailed design within each functional module is illustrated by UML timing diagram and class diagram to clarify the classes used. Finally, the system is tested end-to-end to verify whether the results of the view layer meet the design guidelines, whether the system modules work together properly, and whether the functional development meets the requirements.
... Finally, the TAM implies a subject-object relationship between a user and a technology, indeed, there is an act of the user adopting the technology, such a linear relationship is not true anymore with emotional AI technologies increasingly being embedded as a ubiquitous, ambient factor forming the background in personal devices or in public spaces. Affect-sensing algorithms can read, track, and respond to our various emotional states, often with gearing toward various ulterior aims such as mental health surveillance (Conway & O'Connor, 2016;Gruebner et al., 2016), or maximizing certain desired behaviors (Williamson, 2021;Zuboff, 2019).The constant shaping of AI-powered physical and digital platforms of our behaviors dictates novel ways of conceptualizing existing and future models for technological acceptance. It requires a more human-centric approach, incorporating a new system of values and paradigms of understanding human-machine relations, where large parts of society are willing to trade emotional transparency for enhanced capacity to work better, live well, and manage negative emotions such as stresses, anger, etc. ...
With the rise of emotional AI, citizens are increasingly subjected to the practice of non-conscious emotional data harvesting, i.e., the opaque ways in which their emotions are analyzed, categorized, and responded to by algorithm. The facts that nowadays, AI technologies not only feel but also feed our emotions, often operate silently in the background of our physical and virtual infrastructure without our knowledge, and are quietly moving across cultural and national borders necessitate a more culturally sensitive way of quantitively studying the act of technological acceptance. Thus, this study provides the first attempt to extend the Technological Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1989) model with insights from the Mindsponge model of information filtering (Vuong and Napier, 2015) and the Bayesian statistical approach. Analyzing a multinational dataset of 1,015 young adults (age 18-27) with this new framework, this study aims to understand behavioral factors determining the attitude toward non-conscious data harvesting by the government and the private sector. First, we find that the data fitting results of mindsponge-based TAM models are distributed more Bayesian weights compared to the purely TAM models in both the public and private cases. The results suggest fertile ground for future studies that further explore the intersection of psychology, culture, and technology. Second, the analyses also indicate that autonomy and self-efficacy seem to solve the so-called privacy-personalization paradox, where people state a strong preference for privacy but are willing to give up their personal data for personalized benefits. Concretely, we find positive correlates of attitude toward non-conscious data harvesting by either governmental or private sectors are the variables that measure the familiarity with the AI technologies, perceived utility of AI technologies, emotional control when engaging with social media discussion, and using social media for public messaging. Finally, this study found an indicator for the lack of trust toward the government’s engagement with non-conscious dataveillance, concurring with the literature. These results carry important implications for governing and ethical living in the age of emotional AI.
... AI technologies that automatically track, categorize, and respond to human emotions are uncritically ushered into our daily life for both personal (Hollis et al., 2018;Pur et al., 2020) and institutional use (Williamson, 2021), especially in the remote work environment propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic (Kate. . However, studies on user perception of the collection and analysis of non-conscious emotional data are few and far between. ...
This paper first reviews the worrying trend of increasing use of emotion-sensing devices and non-conscious data collection through AI technologies. Next, it examines university students’ attitudes towards non-conscious harvesting of emotional data by the government and private sectors in a dataset of 1,015 survey responses of students from 48 countries and 8 regions worldwide with the Bayesian Hamiltonian Monte Carlo approach. The empirical results highlight the explanatory significance of sociocultural factors as well as the psychological mechanism behind technological acceptance. They also demonstrate the advantage of traditional theories such as Davis’s “Technological Acceptance Model” in the inclusion of cross-cultural factors such as religions and regions, given the transfer of new technologies across borders. The male gender, a higher income, and a business major appear as reliable predictors of little/no anxiety toward non-conscious data collection by the government and private sector. Whether the data harvester is the government, or the private sector seems to play a subtle, yet decisive role in people’s acceptance of the new technologies, especially in relation to the Muslim and Christian population. These empirical results carry important policy and governance implications which are discussed in the paper.
... Aspects of the assessments seemed to reflect the neoliberal orientation toward individualism and competitiveness. In the literature, I found SEL programs challenged for their insufficiency to address authentic interpersonal conflicts and in particular, intersections of racial identity (Simmons, 2019), dis/ability (Cipriano & Rappolt-Schlichtmann, 2020), and as meritocratic practices that would sort and compare students' skills (Williamson, 2019) within an underlying market focus (Belfield et al., 2015). Nolan's (2015) comparison of care ethics to SEL captured my choice: '(Care ethics is) a student-driven practice predicated on a humanist model rather than a data-driven practice predicated on a productivity model ' (p. ...
This self-study describes my year-long investigation to create caring community in my fourth-grade classroom. An introspective and dialogic pedagogy of intention-setting revealed students’ experiences of taken-for-granted uncaring. This window into students’ experiences afforded me opportunities to model care. Intentionality, dialogue, and collective commitment helped students learn to conceive of their own justifications and methods for caring across differences of ability, culture, and race. The sensitivity of self-study to my students’ learning gave me patience and courage in the unchartered and uncertain process of pedagogical innovation. The students’ inclinations to care imply possibilities for a care (versus duty) based morality.
... Educational research on standards as governing tools highlights the proliferation of numbers and data gathering regarding educational practices, as well as the widespread belief that this contributes to transparency and quality in education (Landri, 2018;Ozga, 2011). Wide sets of standards built on numerical information enable complex digital governance of education within and across national educational systems (Hartong, 2016;Landri, 2018;Williamson, 2016Williamson, , 2021. Such governing is possible because standards work as tools for coordination and make information mobile and comparable between contexts (Bowker & Star, 1999;Busch, 2011). ...
This introductory chapter introduces standards and standardisation as
concepts of outmost relevance to current educational practice and policy
across the world, and it frames them historically, empirically, as well as
theoretically. Furthermore, it gives an overview of how the book is structured
and how it can be seen to contribute to the wider field of research in
education. The chapter starts by introducing the concepts before it provides
the reader with a background description of the broad discursive landscape of
policy developments, painted by educational policy research. Subsequently it
describes how standards and standardisation have been theorised within
educational research, and then concludes with a presentation of the different
contributions.
... Williamson, B [31]. proposed Social and emotional learning (SEL) creates new statistical 'psycho-economic' types involving students and integrates psychometry with the economic analysis. ...
Recent advances in the field of digital technology have enabled the expansion of the business market to a new level. Digital business markets encompass eminent features like increased transparency, enhanced customer relationship, flexible business targets, customer participation, etc. It aids in enhancing traditional business quality by bridging the relationship between the suppliers and the customers. The massive development of internet technology in recent years has largely contributed to the emergence of digital business. The digitization of the business world helps small and medium enterprises create a new digital network, which allows overcoming large enterprises' dominance. Since small and medium enterprises play a major role in determining a country's economy, the digital market's emergence and development are very important. The self-organizing capability of the digital market is the main advantage for newly emerging enterprises. Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in customers' migration from offline shopping to the online market. These changing business models mandate the need for policies and control mechanisms. Using these policies, digital business projects are developed using an open environment using which the small and medium enterprises can interact with each other. These policies and control mechanisms outline the rules to be followed to avoid the current digital market issues. These policies must be designed to improve and ensure the welfare of future digital business systems. Thus, this paper aims to explore the policies associated with regulating and promoting the digital business economy.
... For example, ClassDojo, a mobile application, currently allows millions of teachers to give positive points for desired students' behaviors on a smartphone while giving a lesson. In this vein, emotional A.I. and affective computing technologies have enabled an instantiation of psychological governance in education (Williamson, 2017(Williamson, , 2021. In the context of our daily life, Spotify can suggest playlists by sensing a person's mood (Ratliff, 2016), or Amazon's home assistant, Alexa, can detect through voice analytics the emotional state of its users, or Grammarly's algorithm can identify emotional tenor in texts (Richardson, 2020). ...
Affective computing is one of the most dynamic, interdisciplinary researched topics that draw on computer sciences, engineering, psychology, physiology, and neuroscience to computationally model, track, and classify emotions and affective states. This field is the foundation of the fast-growing USD 20 billion emotional A.I. industry that transforms the way we live and work. Its applications range from music playlists compiling algorithms, drowsiness-detecting car engine, tone-sensing via texts, or micro-targeting algorithms for political ads. We deploy bibliometric analysis on a dataset of 1,646 Web-of-Science-indexed academic articles from 1995 to 2020 to track the development of the field: its growth rate, major players, major collaborative networks, and thematic evolution. The annual growth rate of scientific production is 12.5%. There is an exponential growth of scientific publications in this field, as the number of publication output in 2016-2020 alone far outstrips that in the previous 20 years (860 vs. 786). While the U.S. dominates the field both in research output and citation from 1995-2015, China emerges as a major player as research published by corresponding authors from China overtake the USA as most cited in 2016-2020. Surprisingly, Japan was missing in the top 10 countries measured by both output and citation. Our analysis also identifies two major collaborative networks: the “Asia Pacific cluster” of the USA., China, Singapore, Japan; the “European” cluster of Germany, the U.K., and the Netherlands. Finally, the thematic analysis reveals a growing academic interest in further fine-tuning computational techniques related to affective computing, as well as a decline of interest in using affective computing to detect and study mental illnesses such as depression and bipolar disorders. From these observations of the historical data, we speculate on the future trends of this dynamic research field.
... The current interest in digital infrastructures and platforms for data analysis and prediction reflects a similar attempt to account for the heterogeneity of technologies in the ambit of "educational assemblages", conceptualised as ensembles of materiality, politics and gover-nance cultures (Decuypere & Landri, 2020;Gorur, 2011;Williamson, 2019). A related and established line of enquiry in education policy research often follows heterogeneous actors and ideas across different contexts, mapping their trajectory between fields and examining how forms of knowledge are "signified" as they move and consolidate (Ball, 2016;Savage, 2020). ...
This article examines underdetermination as a key theoretical assumption in an emerging body of educational research. Underdetermination is described as a broad philosophical position that assumes that social, scientific and technological phenomena cannot be reduced to linear relationships between antecedents and consequences, for instance through the canonical progression from scientific hypotheses to experimentation and then empirical truths. Rather, phenomena are underdetermined by constellations of social and material influences that make the choice of univocal explanations problematic. The principle of underdetermination is implicit in a recent strand of educational research that critiques orthodox interpretations of scientific practices, innovation processes and policy dynamics, recasting them as social, material and political “assemblages”. In the article, I analyse the philosophical and epistemological tenets of underdetermination, in order to clarify its nature as a “first principle” in this emerging body of research. By doing so, the article brings into view a broader theoretical debate that has great bearing on future research efforts. The article critically considers the continued theoretical relevance of underdetermination, whilst acknowledging critical arguments mounted against it, namely ontological relativism and political weakness. Some supplementing theoretical ideas are explored in the conclusion.
... Instead, they evoke domain-specific 'promissory visions' (Beer, 2018). The promises of granular and socio-emotional personalisation (Williamson, 2019), and machinic neutrality and objectivity in educational assessment (Perrotta & Selwyn, 2019) are not just imported from other fields where datafication is pervasive; they have been adapted to the specificities of education. This adaptation reflects a distinctive trajectory towards a form of 'computational rationality' that frames educational problems in terms of calculability and prediction (Gulson & Webb, 2017). ...
Digital platforms have become central to interaction and participation in contemporary societies. New forms of ‘platformized education’ are rapidly proliferating across education systems, bringing logics of datafication, automation, surveillance, and interoperability into digitally mediated pedagogies. This article presents a conceptual framework and an original analysis of Google Classroom as an infrastructure for pedagogy. Its aim is to establish how Google configures new forms of pedagogic participation according to platform logics, concentrating on the cross-platform interoperability made possible by application programming interfaces (APIs). The analysis focuses on three components of the Google Classroom infrastructure and its configuration of pedagogic dynamics: Google as platform proprietor, setting the ‘rules’ of participation; the API which permits third-party integrations and data interoperability, thereby introducing automation and surveillance into pedagogic practices; and the emergence of new ‘divisions of labour’, as the working practices of school system administrators, teachers and guardians are shaped by the integrated infrastructure, while automated AI processes undertake the ‘reverse pedagogy’ of learning insights from the extraction of digital data. The article concludes with critical legal and practical ramifications of platform operators such as Google participating in education.
... This is the case, for example, when PISA results lead to particular types of national level policy decisions. Increasingly critical education policy scholars are focusing on the collection of student behavioural data via 'personalized learning' software developed by private sector providers which opens up 'human emotion and behaviour to constant monitoring, quantification, classification, and manipulation' (Williamson 2019). Through this range of contexts, critical education scholars argue that often the numbers are being used to justify or implement policy decision-making, rather than to inform it. ...
This paper looks beyond the environmental and sustainability education (ESE) field for ideas on understanding the research-policy relationship. It examines two specific bodies of literature that have analysed the interplay of research and policy in different ways – critical policy studies and evidence use studies. Bringing these two literatures into conversation, we draw out insights in relation to: what counts as evidence in policy decision-making, what influences policy processes beyond evidence, and what roles research can play in relation to policy making. We then consider how these issues from beyond the field might advance research and policy in ESE. We argue that ESE policy is distinctive in its scale, breadth and contestation, and that there is a need for more diverse work in relation to the ESE research-policy interface.
This concluding chapter reiterates and ties together the key arguments from the previous chapters and expands our main findings by relating them to contemporary developments and initiatives pursued by UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank, as well as to the main theoretical perspectives we have outlined in Chap. 1. The chapter also addresses contemporary shifts in the global governance of education, in particular the rising influence of the corporate sector and the shift from multilateralism to multistakeholderism. Finally, we offer some speculative reflections on its future trajectories, dynamics and agendas.
The research aimed to develop e-lectures in light of social and emotional learning to enhance academic achievement, engagement in learning and reduce the sense of social isolation among graduate students. The sample included (21) students conducting the Master of Education Technology at Cairo University divided randomly into a control group of (10) students using distance learning through traditional e-lectures and an experimental one of (11) students using distance learning through e-lectures based on social and emotional learning through an e-learning platform at Cairo University. The research was applied in 2020/2021. The experimental treatment resulted in the design of a general framework of social and emotional learning for higher education in distance learning that developed e-lectures using educational and social strategies (active e-listening, e-sharing, empathy, e-choice and responsibility, e-warmth and support) The results showed that e-lectures based on social and emotional learning were effective in enhancing academic achievement, engagement in learning and reducing the sense of social isolation. The results were discussed in light of theories of social learning, behavioral change, control-value, and self-reporting. The research recommended a new approach to social and emotional learning implementation in distance learning that depends on teachers’ integration of a range of strategies into their daily educational interactions and practice with students in e-lectures. Keywords: Social and emotional learning, e-lectures, academic achievement, engagement in learning, social isolation
Amidst intersecting sociopolitical conversations around social and emotional learning (SEL), it is crucial to foster a sense of self-reflexive awareness and discursive engagement among pre-service and in-service teachers. In what I describe as a sociopolitical literature review (i.e., addressing empirical literature and public dialogue), I consider SEL through the pedagogical metaphor of a “problem tree.” I contextualize SEL not only through its manifestations (“leaves”) but also its cultural and historical underpinnings (“roots”). I end with a call for discourse communities as a collaborative form of professional development that can help teachers grapple with complexities surrounding SEL and social justice.
Emotional artificial intelligence (AI) is a narrow, weak form of an AI system that reads, classifies, and interacts with human emotions. This form of smart technology has become an integral layer of our digital and physical infrastructures and will radically transform how we live, learn, and work. Not only will emotional AI provide numerous benefits (i.e., increased attention and awareness, optimized productivity, stress management, etc.), but in sensing and interacting with our intimate emotions, it seeks to surreptitiously modify human behaviors. This study proposes to bring together the Technological Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Moral Foundation Theory to study determinants of emotional AI's acceptance under the analytical framework of the Three-pronged Approach (Contexts, Variables, and Statistical models). We argue that to quantitatively study the acceptance of new technologies, it is necessary to leverage two intuitions. The first is the degree of acceptance increases with how users of smart technology perceive its utilities and ease of use (formalized in the TAM). The second is the degree of acceptance decreases with the user's perception of threat or affirmation posed by the technology in relation to social norms and values (formalized in the Moral Foundation Theory). This study begins by mapping the ecology of current emotional AI use in various contexts such as workplace, education, healthcare, personal assistance, etc. It then provides a brief review and critique of current applications of the TAM and the Moral Foundation Theory in studying how humans judge smart technologies. Finally, we propose the Three-pronged Analytical Framework, offering recommendations on how future studies of technological acceptance could be conducted from the questionnaire design to building statistical models.
Whilst technology may have been the ‘saviour’ of HE from the immediate challenges of the pandemic, the opportunistic dialogue emerging in response is imbued with notions of the pandemic as a catalyst for change. Empowered by the apparent success of technology’s deliverance, the door has been opened to unprecedented investment into a pervasive and data-driven paradigm of technology. Utilising a Critical Discourse Analysis of sector-orientated literature published in response to the pandemic, this paper examines the emergent rhetoric of technology and problematises taken for granted assumptions concerning its adoption in the imagined future of HE. This paper argues that such rhetoric is mediatory of neoliberal and consumerist ideologies, and that the portrayal of technology as a wholly beneficial enterprise obscures other issues and inequalities. By positioning educational technology in a uniquely political light, this paper offers a critical lens through which to view this new era of technological pervasion.
This article explores how the concept of affective infrastructure might offer a productive vantage point from which to theorize the ways that affects condition education policy and politics in education. In particular, the article theorizes ‘affective infrastructure’ to discuss the potentialities that emerge in struggles to formulate and enact new political imaginaries for a more inclusive and equitable future in education. The analysis turns to recent literature in education policy in order to identify the extent to which the notion of ‘affective infrastructure’ is used, and emphasizes the political significance of ‘affective infrastructure’ in education policy. Finally, the article explicates a number of future research trajectories in education policy along two ‘sides’ of ‘affective infrastructure,’ namely, affects as products of infrastructures, and affective conditions as producers of infrastructures. It is argued that an affective infrastructural lens can offer new insights into education spaces, practices, and policies.
An essay based on a lecture series of 'Futureducation'
Affective computing, also known as emotional AI, is an emerging and cutting-edge field of AI research. It draws on computer science, engineering, psychology, physiology, and neu-roscience to computationally model, track, and classify human emotions and affective states. While the US once dominated the field in terms of research and citation from 1995-2015, China is now emerging as a global contender in research output, claiming second place for the most cited country from 2016-2020. This article maps the rhizomatic growth and development of scientific publications devoted to emotion-sensing AI technologies. It employs a bibliometric analysis that identifies major national contributors and international alliances in the field over the past 25 years. Contrary to the ongoing political rhetoric of a new Cold War, we argue that there are in fact vibrant AI research alliances and ongoing collaborations between the West and China, especially with the US, despite competing interests and ethical concerns. Our observations of historical data indicate two major collaborative networks: the "US/Asia-Pacific cluster" consisting of the US, China, Singapore, Japan and the "European" cluster of Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands. Our analysis also uncovers a major shift in the focus of affective computing research away from diagnosis and detection of mental illnesses to more commercially viable applications in smart city design. In this article, we also discuss the absence of Russia in the list of top countries for scientific output as well as state-of-the-art techniques such as the ensemble method of symbolic and sub-symbolic AI.
Social and emotional learning (SEL) services from schools will help achieve good results for pupils. Nevertheless, these systems often lose efficiency and struggle to achieve the desired positive results. The ongoing study assesses the effect of application consistency on accomplishing a 12–19-year-old SEL-based school-based program. The research looks at the impact of various aspects of the project, such as dosages, compliance, customer satisfaction, and respondent response. The study gathered data from 35 school systems over three times using randomized controlled layouts and contrasted this data between four components: high adoption, low compliance, and regulation. School-based prevention through social and emotional learning (SP-SML) is proposed. The research compiled results from 35 school systems. Finite mixture models lengthwise determined the correlation between deployment evidence and formations information. The results showed that only the high-implementation community (declined emotional repression; decreased coping with preventative problems; improved coping with welfare protection; lower levels of depression and depressed side effects) had experienced the system's beneficial effects. The analysis of the implementing proportions showed a significant impact on all the design cues only by a commitment to performance. This research underlines the value of good quality execution as practical results and promotes the requirement for a multi-dimensional assessment of their implementations. The proposed method's outcomes in result analysis are: program effect size ratio is 85.6%, emotional intelligence score ratios are 88.3%, and efficiency analysis overall ratio is 90.4%.
This research looked at the combination of cognitive performative conduct, academic commitment, and pair segregation over four years among 700 adolescents aged 10 to 16 ages initially, varying from moderate physical abuse up to verbal Violence. Three classes were detained for their positive reinforcement: moderate imprisonment, extreme body penalty, violent abuse, and disciplinary interventions recorded by caregivers and children. They were taken into consideration. Only Initial vulnerability to physical trauma was substantially linked to decreased brain abilities, adjusting for psychology and social variables. A behavior development framework of children psychological abuse (BDF-CPA) is proposed. There was a reduction in school attendance connected with physical punishments and increasing alienation between peers. If an individual has recorded a specific penalty or a career, our results have been reasonably straightforward. In general, our results indicate that information abuse avoidance can improve individuals' intellectual growth and might not be adequate alone to guarantee that students are protected and well adapted in education.
This book explores the growth of 'character education' in schools and youth organisations over the last decade. It delves into historical and contemporary debates through a geopolitical lens. With a renewed focus on values and virtues such as grit, gumption, perseverance, resilience, generosity, and neighbourliness, this book charts the re-imagining and re-fashioning of a 'character agenda' in England and examines its multiscalar geographies. It explores how these moral geographies of education for children and young people have developed over time. Drawing on original research and examples from schools, military and uniformed youth organisations, and the state-led National Citizen Service, the book critically examines the wider implications of the 'character agenda' across the UK and beyond. It does so by raising a series of questions about the interconnections between character, citizenship, and values and highlighting how these moral geographies reach far beyond the classroom or campsite. Offering critical insights on the roles of character, citizenship and values in modern education, this book will be of immense value to educationists, teachers and policymakers. It will appeal students and scholars of human geography, sociology, education studies, cultural studies and history.
Growing societal concern about a crisis in the wellbeing of young people has prompted a range of responses from governments and corporations, predicated on an ideal of the resilient, self-reliant individual. Behavioural economists, data scientists and educational technology companies now offer a variety of psychological interventions based on psychometric data, aimed at ‘equipping’ individual students with the necessary skills and character to enable them to withstand the pressures of contemporary life. As a consequence, the critical importance of mutually supportive interpersonal relationships continues to be neglected in mainstream approaches to Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). This article draws on Fromm’s theory of social character and Zuboff’s analysis of ‘life in the hive’ to challenge the assumptions about human behaviour underpinning data science and its application in digital tools for social and emotional learning and self-managed wellbeing. To improve students’ wellbeing, we need to begin with an understanding of why they are more likely to thrive within a network of mutually supportive social relationships than a digital ‘hive’.
This article examines a frequent assumption of sociological accounts of knowledge: the idea that knowledge acts. The performativity of knowledge claims is here analysed through the prism of ‘sociological excuses’: the idea that sociological explanations can act as ‘excuses’ for otherwise unacceptable behaviour. The article builds on Austin’s distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary effects to discuss the relationship between sociological explanation, sociological justification and sociological critique. It argues that understanding how (and if) sociological explanations can act requires paying attention to social and political conditions of performativity and their transformation in late liberalism.
Moral Emotions and Human Interdependence in Character Education challenges contemporary mainstream approaches to character education predicated on individualism, 'essential virtues' and generic 'character skills'. This book synthesizes perspectives from phenomenology, psychology, cultural sociology and policy studies into a unique theoretical framework to reveal how ideas from positive psychology, emotional intelligence and Aristotelian virtues have found their way into the classroom. The idealized, self-reliant, resilient, atomized individual at the core of current character education is rejected as one-dimensional. Instead this book argues for an alternative, more complex pedagogy of interdependence that promotes students' well-being by connecting them to the lives of others. This book is an essential read for academics, researchers, postgraduate students and school teachers interested in character education and social and emotional learning.
The OECD’s PISA exercise has by now been widely critiqued. Whilst we agree with most concerns, we begin with the assumption that PISA will remain an enduring and powerful feature of the global educational landscape. Even if the PISA test itself were discontinued, a similar large-scale quantitative assessment exercise would soon arise to take its place. As such, we focus herein on strategies for rearticulating ILSAs such as PISA: the creative use of data to shift the exercise away from dissemination of one dominant worldview towards the recognition of alternatives. To do this, we discuss the approach and findings from our recent papers, and then suggest future directions. Rather than mere accommodation, re-articulation underscores an approach to critique that is generative for theory and practice, one that extends of the horizon of possibility beyond culturally saturated notions of ‘good’ education.
Rapid technological advances, particularly recent artificial intelligence (AI) revolutions such as digital assistants (e.g., Alexa, Siri), self-driving cars, and cobots and robots, have changed human lives and will continue to have even bigger impact on our future society. Some of those AI inventions already shocked people across the world by wielding their power of surpassing human intelligence and cognitive abilities; see, for example, the examples of Watson (IBM’s supercomputer) and AlphaGo (Google DeepMind’s AI program) beating the human champions of Jeopardy and Go games, respectively. Then many questions arise. How does AI affect human beings and the larger society? How should we educate our children in the AI age? What changes are necessary to help humans better adapt and flourish in the AI age? What are the key enablers of the AI revolution, such as big data and machine learning? What are the applications of AI in education and how do they work? Answering these critical questions requires interdisciplinary research. There is no shortage of research on AI per se, since it is a highly important and impactful research topic that cuts across many fields of science and technology. Nevertheless, there are no effective guidelines for educational researchers and practitioners that give quick summaries and references on this topic. Because the intersection of AI and education/learning is an emerging field of research, the literature is in flux and the jury is still out. Thus, our goal here is to give readers a quick introduction to this broad topic by drawing upon a limited selection of books, reports, and articles. This entry is organized into three major sections, where we present commentaries along with a list of annotated references on each of the following areas: (1) AI Impacts on the Society and Education; (2) AI Enablers: Big Data in Education and Machine Learning; and (3) Applications of AI in Education: Examples and Evidence.
The paper summarises the main contributions to the 4th Symposium on Mindfulness in Education at the University of Vienna in January 2020. The conference was hosted by the project "Mindfulness in Teacher Education and Schools" led by Dr. Karlheinz Valtl.
The new concept of Science for Education is proposed in this chapter, based on the 2D suggestion by Donald Stokes about the Pasteur’s quadrant as the golden standard for best efficacy of scientific research. In addition, we introduce and describe the effort to constitute a network of Brazilian leading scientists who perform research translatable to education. A description of the way this network was formed, as well as its proposals and activities are offered. It is expected that the adoption of translational research inspired by education will add virtuously to other policy measures designed to push Brazil and other countries to a more developed educational level.
Assemblage thinking has exploded in policy research, especially among scholars working in the policy mobilities field who are seeking to harness the potential of an assemblage approach to understand how policies move, mutate and manifest in increasingly transnational contexts. The ubiquity of assemblage, however, does not always render it clear, with the concept being variously defined and sometimes lacking conceptual strength and explanatory power. This paper seeks to conceptualize and defend an assemblage approach to policy analysis. By synthesizing core threads from existing literature, it identifies three theoretical and conceptual foundations central to a ‘policy assemblage’ approach: (1) relations of exteriority and emergence; (2) heterogeneity, relationality and flux; and (3) attention to power, politics and agency. Together, these foundations signal a coherency to assemblage thinking and suggest an assemblage approach has powerful potential, allowing researchers to see and explain things in ways that many established traditions in policy research do not. By identifying foundations and offering examples of how each might be mobilized, the paper provides the beginnings of a framework for policy assemblage research not previously articulated in a systematic form, thus inviting further discussion about what it means to undertake policy assemblage research.
New data-driven technologies appear to promise a new era of accuracy and objectivity in scientifically-informed educational policy and governance. The data-scientific objectivity sought by education policy, however, is the result of practices of standardization and quantification deployed to settle controversies about the definition and measurement of human qualities by rendering them as categories and numbers. Focusing on the emerging policy agenda of ‘social and emotional learning and skills,’ this paper examines the practices of ‘objectivity-making’ underpinning this new field. Objectivity-making depends on three translations of (1) scientific expertise into standardized and enumerable definitions, (2) standardization into measurement technologies, and (3) the data produced through measurement technologies into objective policy-relevant knowledge, which consolidates a market in SEL technologies. The paper sheds light on knowledge-making practices in the era of big data and policy science, and their enduring reliance on the precarious construction of objectivity as a key legitimator of policy-relevant scientific knowledge and ‘evidence-based’ education governance.
This paper examines how datafication is creating new topologies of education policy. Specifically, we analyse how the creation of data infrastructures that enable the generation, communication and representation of digital data are changing relations of power, including both centralised and dispersed forms, and space in education. The paper uses conceptual resources from cultural topology and infrastructure studies to provide a framework for analysing spatial relations between educational data, discourses, policies and practices in new governance configurations. The paper outlines a case study of an emergent data infrastructure in Australian schooling, the National Schools Interoperability Program, to provide empirical evidence of the movement, connection and enactment of digital data across policy spaces. Key aspects of this case include the ways that data infrastructure is: (i) enabling new private and public connections across policy topologies; (ii) creating a new role for technical standards in education policy and (iii) changing the topological spaces of education governance.
Understanding human personality has been a focus for philosophers and scientists for millennia¹. It is now widely accepted that there are about five major personality domains that describe the personality profile of an individual2,3. In contrast to personality traits, the existence of personality types remains extremely controversial⁴. Despite the various purported personality types described in the literature, small sample sizes and the lack of reproducibility across data sets and methods have led to inconclusive results about personality types5,6. Here we develop an alternative approach to the identification of personality types, which we apply to four large data sets comprising more than 1.5 million participants. We find robust evidence for at least four distinct personality types, extending and refining previously suggested typologies. We show that these types appear as a small subset of a much more numerous set of spurious solutions in typical clustering approaches, highlighting principal limitations in the blind application of unsupervised machine learning methods to the analysis of big data.
Neurotechnology is an advancing field of research and development with significant implications for education. As ‘postdigital’ hybrids of biological and informational codes, novel neurotechnologies combine neuroscience insights into the human brain with advanced technical development in brain imaging, brain-computer interfaces, neurofeedback platforms, brain stimulation and other neuroenhancement applications. Merging neurobiological knowledge about human life with computational technologies, neurotechnology exemplifies how postdigital science will play a significant role in societies and education in decades to come. As neurotechnology developments are being extended to education, they present potential for businesses and governments to enact new techniques of ‘neurogovernance’ by ‘scanning’ the brain, ‘scraping’ it for data and then ‘sculpting’ the brain toward particular capacities. The aim of this article is to critically review neurotechnology developments and implications for education. It examines the purposes to which neurotechnology development is being put in education, interrogating the commercial and governmental objectives associated with it and the neuroscientific concepts and expertise that underpin it. Finally, the article raises significant ethical and governance issues related to neurotechnology development and postdigital science that require concerted attention from education researchers.
Platform learning harnesses the operating capabilities and logics of digital platforms such as Uber and Amazon to imagine synergies between on-demand labor and on-demand learning, transforming living into learning, and learning into labor. This paper seeks to make three original contributions to critical analysis of platform learning. First, as an analytical foundation, it brings together two distinct strands of scholarship on the evolving relationship between learning and late capitalism, and the digitalization of education policy and governance, synthesizing them in relation to questions concerning labor and work in the emergent on-demand economy. Second, it draws on these ideas to engage the learning and work projections of two strategic forecasting organizations, Institute for the Future and Knowledge Works, as case studies of platform learning. Third, the last section of the paper builds on the sociotechnical projections of these organizations as the basis for a critique of the political economy of platform learning, highlighting four areas requiring further inquiry: (1) value extraction; (2) exploitation of labor; (3) efficacy and inequality; (4) imagination.
What happens when media technologies are able to interpret our feelings, emotions, moods, and intentions? In this cutting edge new book, Andrew McStay explores that very question and argues that these abilities result in a form of technological empathy. Offering a balanced and incisive overview of the issues raised by ‘Emotional AI’, this book:
- Provides a clear account of the social benefits and drawbacks of new media trends and technologies such as emoji, wearables and chatbots
- Demonstrates through empirical research how ‘empathic media’ have been developed and introduced both by start-ups and global tech corporations such as Facebook
- Helps readers understand the potential implications on everyday life and social relations through examples such as video-gaming, facial coding, virtual reality and cities
- Calls for a more critical approach to the rollout of emotional AI in public and private spheres
Combining established theory with original analysis, this book will change the way students view, use and interact with new technologies. It should be required reading for students and researchers in media, communications, the social sciences and beyond.
A ‘Behavioural Insights’ movement has emerged within governments. This movement infuses policymaking with behavioural scientific insights into the rationally bounded nature of human behaviour, hoping to make more effective and cost-efficient policies without being too obtrusive. Alongside sustained admirations of some, others see in Behavioural Insights the threatening revival of technocracy, and more particularly a ‘psychocracy’: a mode of public decision-making that wrongfully reduces the world of policymaking to a rational-instrumental and top-down affair dictated by psychological expertise. This article argues, however, that the claims of technocracy and psychocracy are overgeneralizations, emanating from a frontstage-focused debate that ignores a vast backwater of emerging behavioural policy practices. Grounded in four case studies on behavioural policymaking in Dutch governance, it will be demonstrated that at least part of this backwater is neither so technocratic nor so psychocratic as the critics claim.
Over the past 15 years, there has been a growing interest and investment in ‘character’ education across the UK political landscape. Alongside the activities of central government, character education has been promoted by a range of non-government actors in the UK and beyond, including philanthropic foundations, think tanks, education entrepreneurs, and academics. It is the presence of these actors and their relationship to, and influence on, UK government policy that we examine in this article. Investigating character education from a perspective of policy formation and influence, we trace the key policy actors who have contributed to the adoption of character education in the UK, and their international connections, identifying the resources, activities and relationships through which they have achieved policy influence. A central and original contribution of this article is in identifying the financial and ideological influence of US Christian neoconservative philanthropic foundation the John Templeton Foundation on social science research and policy in the UK. Our analysis identifies academics in the UK and US who, through considerable John Templeton Foundation funding, have provided an evidence base that authorises character education as a policy solution. We also locate ‘policy entrepreneurs’ as key nodal actors, whose social capital and elite membership helps to lubricate network relations and facilitate policy influence. Finally, we consider the motivations and vested interests of policy actors, including the John Templeton Foundation’s particular model of philanthropy, and conclude that the character education agenda is underpinned by a set of ideas that promote a free-market, individualistic and socially conservative worldview.
The ongoing trend towards educational globalisation has brought about various dynamics of education policy ‘rescaling’, resulting in a growing number of governmental arrangements, which are operating across traditional scales, levels or sectors of policy. This contribution takes up the conceptual frameworks of topological spatialisation and assemblage theory to better understand the pivotal role of new information technologies, data infrastructures and also the increasing power of ‘centers of calculation’ within education policy reforms that have been implemented in Germany after the launch of the Programme for International Student Assessment.
To cite this article: Sigrid Hartong (2018): Towards a topological re-assemblage of education policy? Observing the implementation of performance data infrastructures and ‘centers of calculation’ in Germany, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 16:1, 134-150, DOI:
10.1080/14767724.2017.1390665
This meta-analysis reviewed 82 school-based, universal social and emotional learning (SEL) interventions involving 97,406 kindergarten to high school students (Mage = 11.09 years; mean percent low socioeconomic status = 41.1; mean percent students of color = 45.9). Thirty-eight interventions took place outside the United States. Follow-up outcomes (collected 6 months to 18 years postintervention) demonstrate SEL's enhancement of positive youth development. Participants fared significantly better than controls in social-emotional skills, attitudes, and indicators of well-being. Benefits were similar regardless of students’ race, socioeconomic background, or school location. Postintervention social-emotional skill development was the strongest predictor of well-being at follow-up. Infrequently assessed but notable outcomes (e.g., graduation and safe sexual behaviors) illustrate SEL's improvement of critical aspects of students’ developmental trajectories.
The constructs that currently animate today’s dispositions movement are grit and growth mindset. However, the evidence for the reliability and instructional uses of such noncognitive factors in K-12 schools -- and of the surveys and tools that attempt to measure them -- is thin. After a look at the “logic of assessment” with its focus on cognition, observation, and interpretation, the author concludes that the noncognitive data and metrics used by reformers to support decisions to group schools by levels of grit or place students in particular interventions to improve mindset must be validated with common sense and a body of technical evidence.
The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘policy mobilities’ can be applied, and are in fact required, to examine and research the networked and relational, or ‘topological’, nature of globalised education policy, which cuts across the new spaces of policymaking and new modes of global educational governance. In this paper, we examine the methodological issues pertaining to the study of the movement of policy. Informed by contemporary methodological thinking around social network analysis and the ethnographic notion of ‘following the policy’, we discuss the limitations of these approaches to adequately address presence in policy network analysis, and the problem of representing speed and intensity of policy mobility, even while these attempt to solve the problem of relationality and territoriality. We conclude that the methodologies of policy mobility are inexorably intertwined with the (constantly) changing phenomena under examination, and hence require what Lury and Wakeford describe as ‘inventive methods’.
This chapter summarizes the results of nearly 100 years of research on school-based social and emotional learning (SEL). The SEL field has grown out of research in many fields and subfields with which educators, researchers, and policymakers are familiar, including the promotion of social competence, bullying prevention, prevention of drug use and abuse, civic and character education, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, social skills training, and 21st-century skills. The chapter begins with a historical summary of theoretical movements and research trends that have led to today’s inclusion of SEL as part of many schools’ curricula, policies, and practices. Contemporary approaches that represent current policy and societal concerns are discussed in comparative terms. Based on the converging research evidence, this chapter identifies design elements and implementation quality characteristics of effective approaches to SEL. Recommendations for future practice, policy, and research are provided.
This edited volume advances existing research on the production and use of expert knowledge by international bureaucracies. Given the complexity, technicality and apparent apolitical character of the issues dealt with in global governance arenas, ‘evidence-based’ policy-making has imposed itself as the best way to evaluate the risks and consequences of political action in global arenas. In the absence of alternative, democratic modes of legitimation, international organizations have adopted this approach to policy-making. By treating international bureaucracies as strategic actors, this volume address novel questions: why and how do international bureaucrats deploy knowledge in policy-making? Where does the knowledge they use come from, and how can we retrace pathways between the origins of certain ideas and their adoption by international administrations? What kind of evidence do international bureaucrats resort to, and with what implications? Which types of knowledge are seen as authoritative, and why? This volume makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the way global policy agendas are shaped and propagated. It will be of great interest to scholars, policy-makers and practitioners in the fields of public policy, international relations, global governance and international organizations. © 2017 selection and editorial material, Annabelle Littoz-Monnet; individual chapters, the contributors.
There is a growing body of research emphasizing the advantages of teaching students social and emotional (SE) skills in school. Here we examine the economic value of these skills within a benefit-cost analysis (BCA) framework. Our examination has three parts. First, we describe how the current method of BCA must be expanded to adequately evaluate SE skills, and we identify important decisions analysts must make. Second, we review the evidence on the benefits of SE skills, again noting key methodological issues with respect to shadow pricing. Finally, we perform BCA of four selected social and emotional learning (SEL) interventions: 4Rs; Second Step, Life Skills Training; and Responsive Classroom. These analyses illustrate both methodological and empirical challenges in estimating net present values for these interventions. Even with these challenges, we find that the benefits of these interventions substantially outweigh the costs. We highlight promising areas of research for improving the application of BCA to SEL.
Three studies were conducted to develop and validate the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2), a major revision of the Big Five Inventory (BFI). Study 1 specified a hierarchical model of personality structure with 15 facet traits nested within the Big Five domains, and developed a preliminary item pool to measure this structure. Study 2 used conceptual and empirical criteria to construct the BFI-2 domain and facet scales from the preliminary item pool. Study 3 used data from 2 validation samples to evaluate the BFI-2’s measurement properties and substantive relations with self-reported and peer-reported criteria. The results of these studies indicate that the BFI-2 is a reliable and valid personality measure, and an important advance over the original BFI. Specifically, the BFI-2 introduces a robust hierarchical structure, controls for individual differences in acquiescent responding, and provides greater bandwidth, fidelity, and predictive power than the original BFI, while still retaining the original measure’s conceptual focus, brevity, and ease of understanding. The BFI-2 therefore offers valuable new opportunities for research examining the structure, assessment, development, and life outcomes of personality traits.
This paper critically examines the ways in which ClassDojo is altering the disciplinary landscape in schools through the datafication of discipline and student behaviour. ClassDojo is one of the most popular and successful educational technologies and is used internationally. It is a school-based social media platform that incorporates a gamified behaviour-shaping function, providing school communities with a centralised digital network in which to interact. We argue that ClassDojo’s datafying system of school discipline intensifies and normalises the surveillance of students. Furthermore, it creates a culture of performativity and serves as a mechanism for behaviour control.
Free link to full-text: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/P446cBEmgrX8pNNy4eCP/full?target=10.1080/17439884.2018.1558237
Over the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and other cognate disciplines has focused our attention on the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having “disrupted” many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and inter-sectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures.
Organization is increasingly entwined with databased governance infrastructures. Developing the idea of ‘infrastructure as partial connection’ with inspiration from Marilyn Strathern and Science and Technology Studies, this article proposes that database infrastructures are intrinsic to processes of organizing intra- and inter-organizational relations. Seeing infrastructure as partial connection brings our attention to the ontological experimentation with knowing organizations through work of establishing and cutting relations. We illustrate this claim through a multi-sited ethnographic study of ‘The Data Warehouse’. ‘The Data Warehouse’ is an important infrastructural component in the current reorganization of Danish educational governance which makes schools’ performance public and comparable. We suggest that ‘The Data Warehouse’ materializes different, but overlapping, infrastructural experiments with governing education at different organizational sites enacting a governmental hierarchy. Each site can be seen as belonging to the same governance infrastructure but also as constituting ‘centres’ in its own right. ‘The Data Warehouse’ participates in the always-unfinished business of organizational world making and is made to (partially) relate to different organizational concerns and practices. This argument has implications for how we analyze the organizational effects of pervasive databased governance infrastructures and invites exploring their multiple organizing effects.
Recent public controversies, ranging from the 2014 Facebook ‘emotional contagion’ study to psychographic data profiling by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 American presidential election, Brexit referendum and elsewhere, signal watershed moments in which the intersecting trajectories of psychology and computer science have become matters of public concern. The entangled history of these two fields grounds the application of applied psychological techniques to digital technologies, and an investment in applying calculability to human subjectivity. Today, a quantifiable psychological subject position has been translated, via ‘big data’ sets and algorithmic analysis, into a model subject amenable to classification through digital media platforms. I term this position the ‘scalable subject’, arguing it has been shaped and made legible by algorithmic psychometrics – a broad set of affordances in digital platforms shaped by psychology and the behavioral sciences. In describing the contours of this ‘scalable subject’, this paper highlights the urgent need for renewed attention from STS scholars on the psy sciences, and on a computational politics attentive to psychology, emotional expression, and sociality via digital media.
This article offers a critical discursive reading of the 2014 Character and Resilience Manifesto (hereafter the Manifesto), focusing on the sources and legitimation strategies supporting its claims. As an All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility document, the Manifesto traces both old and new discursive tropes framing policy strategy on education and social care, extending into current political agendas around mental health and well-being and even child safeguarding and securitisation. While the Manifesto’s supposed evidence-based claims draw extensively on a specifically commissioned literature review undertaken by Gutman and Schoon, problems are identified with how this is represented in the Manifesto, including significant omissions and slippages within Gutman and Schoon’s text and between this and the Manifesto. Analysis highlights exaggerations of the claims made in Gutman and Schoon’s review in the Manifesto while important conceptual clarifications (between resilience and coping and the non-generalisability of resilience) are overlooked. Commentators’ cautions over the evaluation and comparability of current programmes also fail to appear. Beyond such asymmetries, a common narrative identified across both texts reformulates emotions away from their ‘soft’, culturally feminised, associations to become ‘hard and tough’, and abstracted from relationship and (sociopolitical) context. Clearly, such gendering of emotions can be situated in relation to wider discourses of feminisation, alongside others de-emphasising classed and racialised inequalities. Overall, the Manifesto performs its own rhetoric, manifesting its own buoyancy to resist critical engagement and further the contemporary moral doctrine of inciting voluntarist optimistic subjects, devoid of attention to class, gender or racialised inequalities.
This book addresses the wave of innovation and reforms that has been called the nudge or behavioural public policy agenda, which has emerged in many countries since the mid-2000s. Nudge involves developing behavioural insights to solve complex policy problems, such as unemployment, obesity and the environment, as well as improving the delivery of policies by reforming standard operating procedures. It reviews the changes that have taken place, in particular the greater use of randomised evaluations, and discusses how far nudge can be used more generally in the policy process. The book argues that nudge has a radical future if it develops a more bottom up approach involving greater feedback and more engagement with citizens.
Mind-sets (aka implicit theories) are beliefs about the nature of human attributes (e.g., intelligence). The theory holds that individuals with growth mind-sets (beliefs that attributes are malleable with effort) enjoy many positive outcomes—including higher academic achievement—while their peers who have fixed mind-sets experience negative outcomes. Given this relationship, interventions designed to increase students’ growth mind-sets—thereby increasing their academic achievement—have been implemented in schools around the world. In our first meta-analysis (k = 273, N = 365,915), we examined the strength of the relationship between mind-set and academic achievement and potential moderating factors. In our second meta-analysis (k = 43, N = 57,155), we examined the effectiveness of mind-set interventions on academic achievement and potential moderating factors. Overall effects were weak for both meta-analyses. However, some results supported specific tenets of the theory, namely, that students with low socioeconomic status or who are academically at risk might benefit from mind-set interventions.
A behavioural insights community has emerged within a growing number of governments. While this community helps to make policies more behavioural science based, its frontstage role models tend to assume a straightforward, instrumental and apolitical view of the science–policy relationship that seems unrealistic. This article therefore examines what goes on backstage in this community, based on an ethnographic study of behaviour experts in Dutch central government. The article argues that their work consists of a complex palette of practices (that is, choice architecture; analysis; capacity building). Because these practices resemble typical knowledge brokerage work, the article pushes for an envisaging of ‘behaviour experts as knowledge brokers’.
This paper investigates the commercialisation of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in Australian schools. Specifically, it focuses on understanding why teachers value commercial resources, and how they enact these in their classrooms. Theorising around teacher agency suggests teachers are now choosing to use a range of commercial resources and view these as important additions to their pedagogical toolbox. Teachers want high quality resources, and they prefer resources that are easy to import, scaffold and modify according to their specific needs. Teachers did not readily see the benefit of a prescriptive SEL program. Instead, they wanted multiple resources that they could pick and choose the best bits from. Our data suggests that teachers are not being seduced by commercialisation and the ‘easy fix’ it promises, but are in fact presenting as agentic professionals who care deeply about students’ social and emotional wellbeing and are working to tailor bespoke learning experiences to meet the needs of their students within their specific school contexts. We argue that it is worth nuancing the critique about commercialisation offered in the literature to date, and suggest that commercialisation is not inherently bad, rather it is the ‘intensity’ of commercialisation that needs to be regulated and further investigated.
Edu.net builds upon, and extends, a series of research studies of education policy networks and global policy mobilities. It draws on comprehensive data resulting from a Leverhulme Trust research study focused on Africa, and a study funded by the British Academy focused on India, which explored the wayin which global actors and organisations bring policy ideas to bear and are joined up in a global education policy network. This timely and cutting-edge new work develops concepts, analyses and methods deployed in Education Plc (2008), Networks, New Governance and Education (2012) and Global Education Inc. (2012). The research is framed by an elaboration of Network Ethnography, an innovative method of policy research. Edu.net presents the substantive findings of the authors’ research by focusing on various kinds of policy movement - people, ideas, practices, methods, money. The book is about both global education policy and ways of researching policy in a global setting. It is an essential read for policy analysts, educational academic researchers and postgraduate education students alike.
Many governments in the developed world can now best be described as ʼneuroliberal’: having a combination of neoliberal principles with policy initiatives derived from insights in the behavioural sciences. Neuroliberalism presents the results of the first critical global study of the impacts of the behavioural sciences on public policy and government actions, including behavioural economics, behavioural psychology and neuroeconomics. Drawing on interviews with leading behaviour change experts, organizations and policy-makers, and discussed in alignment with a series of international case studies, this volume provides a critical analysis of the ethical, economic, political and constitutional implications of behaviourally oriented government. It explores the impacts of the behavioural sciences on everyday life through a series of themes, including: understandings of the human subject; interpretations of freedom; the changing form and function of the state; the changing role of the corporation in society; and the design of everyday environments and technologies. The research presented in this volume reveals a diverse set of neuroliberal approaches to government that offer policy-makers and behaviour change professionals a real choice in relation to the systems of behavioural government they can implement. This book also argues that the behavioural sciences have the potential to support much more effective systems of government, but also generate new ethical concerns that policy-makers should be aware of. © 2018 Mark Whitehead, Rhys Jones, Rachel Lilley, Jessica Pykett and Rachel Howell.
This paper examines the development of data infrastructure in Australian schooling with a specific focus on interoperability standards that help to make new markets for education data. The conceptual framework combines insights from studies of infrastructure, economic markets and digital data. The case of the Australian National Schools Interoperability Program is analysed, drawing on a corpus of web-based technical and promotional documents and supporting interviews. The paper shows that Australia has well-developed data infrastructure in schooling that is creating new relations between schools, school systems and commercial vendors within network markets for data-driven educational technologies.
From drugging kids into attention and reviving behaviorism to biometric measurements of teaching and learning Scripted Bodies exposes a brave new world of education in the age of repression. Scripted Bodies examines how corporeal control has expanded in education, how it impacts the mind and thinking, and the ways that new technologies are integral to the expansion of control. Scripted Bodies contends that this rise in repression must be understood in relation to the broader economic, political, and cultural forces that have produced an increasingly authoritarian society. This book details how these new forms of corporeal control shut down the possibility of public schools developing as places where thinking becomes the organizing principle needed to contribute to a more equal, just, and democratic society.
My response to Humphry begins with some reflections upon why it is that after more than a century, psychometrics still lacks plausible substantive theories underwriting its claims to measure mental attributes and I explore the possibility that it is more myth-based technology than science. Historically, psychometrics has lacked any interest in coming to grips scientifically with the logical commitments of the presumption, implicit in the theories it does have (e.g., its Item Response Theories), that the attributes it aspires to measure are continuous quantities. This lack of interest might also explain Humphry’s misunderstanding of what is involved in the measurement theory axiom of continuity and his curious claim to have located a paradox therein. However, his attempt to rule the entire corpus of measurement theory as irrelevant to the enterprise of constructing and investigating substantive, psychometric theories betrays a failure to recognise that the form of substantive, quantitative theories also raises issues requiring empirical investigation.
Educational environments are increasingly using online technologies that aim to identify and manage students through affect. These forms of monitoring can be understood as a method of approaching students through the lens of positive psychology. Clearly, the relationship between schools, technology, and affect is not straightforward or benign. Yet, despite recent attention to the educational benefits of social and emotional intelligence, most educational discussions pay little critical attention to affect in terms of external interests regulating the behaviours and dispositions of students. This paper examines how student subjectivities are managed by the modulation of affect through online platforms in/for school. It is separated into three broad sections that capture the themes emerging as central to the relations between student populations and techniques of affectivity: sensation, intensity, and value. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications that arise from how online technologies are used to mediate student subjectivities in secondary school.
The last 20 years has witnessed the spread of corporatism in education on a global scale. In England, this trend is characterised by new structural and cultural approaches to education found in the ‘academies’ programme and the adoption of private sector management styles. The corporate re-imagining of schools has also led to the introduction into the curriculum of particular forms of character education aimed at managing the ‘emotional labour’ of children. This paper argues that character education rests on a fallacy that the development of desirable character traits in children can be engineered by mimicking certain behaviours from the adult world. The weaknesses in the corporate approach to managing ‘emotional labour’ are illustrated with empirical data from two primary schools. An alternative paradigm is presented which locates the ‘emotional labour’ of children within a ‘holding environment’ that places children’s well-being at its core.
Apocalyptic crisis discourses of mental health problems and psycho-emotional dysfunction are integral to behaviour change agendas across seemingly different policy arenas. Bringing these agendas together opens up new theoretical and empirical lines of enquiry about the symbioses and contradictions surrounding the human subjects they target. The paper explores the relationship between behaviour change policy, enduring philosophical and political scepticism about the viability of the rational, autonomous subject of liberal and neoliberal governance, and the contemporary cultural privileging of its vulnerable, anxious and stressed counterpart. Weber’s accounts of authority illuminate dangers arising from an ad hoc, shifting, unaccountable state-sponsored intervention market that targets the vulnerable subject, proselytised by new types of ‘therapeutic entrepreneurs’. Using an education-based example of statutory legislation for counter-terrorism in schools and universities, the Prevent strategy, the ...
This article gives an account of the use of knowledges from emerging scientific fields in education and youth policy making under the Coalition government (2010–15) in the UK. We identify a common process of ‘translation’ and offer three illustrations of policy-making in the UK that utilise diverse knowledges produced in academic fields (neuroscience, network theory and well-being). This production of ‘new knowledges’ in policy contexts allows for the identification of sites of policy intervention. This process of translation underlies a series of diverse revisions of the rational subject of policy. Collectively, these revisions amount to a change in policy-making and the emergence of a different subject of neoliberal policy. This subject is not an excluded alterity to an included rational subject of neoliberalism, but a ‘plastic subject’ characterised by its multiplicity. The plastic subject does not contradict the rational subject as central to neoliberal policy-making, but diversifies it.