Knowledge and numbers in education

This special issue takes as its core theme the relationship between knowledge and numbers in education, with a particular emphasis on the diverse forms of knowledge that emerge from the collection and use of numerical data within education, and the knowledge communities they help create who understand, analyse and respond to the data in different ways. Numerical data encode more or less information depending upon how they are formed, with which context of use in mind, according to whose interpretative rules. Statistics as a knowledge field sets out very precise conditions for the treatment of the numerical data it collects and then analyses. Once the data are assembled and stabilised as objects of (empirical) investigation, statisticians would expect to reflect on the interplay between the objective structure of mathematics that allows logical inferences to proceed from clearly stated assumptions and the nature of those assumptions encoded in the data. How much one might be entitled to conclude from such inferences is assessed in this light. The robustness of the data, the aptness of the method and the strength of the claims made will all be rigorously tested in debate within the field. But such data do not remain within the statistical community. On the contrary they travel out into public, policy and educational domains that appropriate them for other purposes and test them in different ways. This special issue sets out to explore this dynamic at work by reviewing the formation, interpretation and use of statistical data in a range of different settings where judgements about the quality of literacy and education are formed. The papers have been developed from the standpoint of different disciplinary traditions which consider statistical data through the lens of their field’s particular interests, methods and analytic concerns, shaped by their longer institutional and discursive histories (Manzon 2009). How this broader epistemological landscape itself shifts is a matter that Cowen (2014) explores in some depth, taking as his point of departure the ways in which comparative traditions have variously dealt with the issue of ‘outcomes’ and ‘transferability’ from one education system to another at different points in time. Historical studies in the social sciences have tracked the interrelationship between the emergence of statistical data and the formation of the state (Hacking 1990; Porter 1995; Desrosieres 2002; Vincent 2014); they have identified how statistical accounts of the social world shape and are shaped by the development of different statistical techniques and their uptake in different social settings (Wooldridge 1994; Stigler 2002). But statistical understandings do not stand still. They are social phenomena that change their form and purpose over time as they are harnessed in different contexts of use (Lawn 2013; Moss 2014). The propositions they encode about the social world are not immutable but vary in line with broader discursive formations. Where once they played an important role in informing the state about its citizens, statistical data now also represent the state’s activities to the citizen, in terms that the citizen is invited to judge (Byrne 2002, 46–49; Novoa and Yariv-Mashal 2003; Landahl and Lundahl 2013). In part this happens through what has been described as ‘governing by