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Education is undergoing various transformations due to new data-driven educational technologies and the management of educational data through data infrastructures. These technologies are frequently promoted to parents and the profession as being ‘revolutionary’ because they represent a new generation of learning. While computer adaptive tests may arguably improve various efficiencies, the argument that they will revolutionise education requires evaluation. In this paper we draw on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to theorise (a) the desire for data amongst policymakers and (b) the effects of data infrastructures as systems that coordinate educational thought. We argue that, rather than revolutionising learning as promised, datafication in computer-based modes merely offers more intense expressions of longstanding possibilities for learning. We describe three types of events—breaks, cracks and ruptures—and argue that data-events translate cracks (imperceptible changes that constitute learning) into breaks (information), but either cannot generate rupture (difference) or represent rupture as error. However, the intensification of learning through datafication may, we suggest, rupture educational thought more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts forward the provocation that optimism has become a trap for educational research. It is argued that optimism underpins the implicit model of modern educational thought, which is oriented toward the future and wants it to be better. However, optimism can become a trap when it encourages investment in promises about the benefits of education that cannot be realized for all. As more and more people invest in education to 'get ahead' their optimism contributes to decreasing the value of credentials and thus undermines the promised benefits. Educational researchers contribute to this bind because the dominant model of modern educational thought is inherently optimistic. However, pessimism offers an inherently unpromising alternative. In a time of economic, environmental, and technological disruption, this article the concept of disaster might provoke lines of thought that go beyond the alternative between optimism or pessimism. The writings of Lauren Berlant, Maurice Blanchot, and Gilles Deleuze provide the theoretical framing for the argument. The article concludes that if optimism has lured educational thought and research into a trap, then it may be time to give up on 'the future' in order to get out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how computerized adaptive testing functions in relation to learning in control societies. We first document the transition from static and discrete forms of statistical work that characterized Foucault’s disciplinary societies into the continuous, predictive analytics that have emerged as the powerful form of statistical work in Deleuze’s control societies. We then explore the function of information science ontologies in adaptive testing and learning applications from the perspective of Deleuze’s philosophical ontology. Working between these two conceptions of ontology enables us to open a critical space in which to posit the need for an alternative ontology of number in education. Focusing on the case of Pearson, the world’s largest edu-business, we consider how the “datafication” of education is presenting opportunities to exploit information assemblages for profit. The primary focus of analysis is Pearson’s Next Generation Assessment agenda, which focuses on the development and implementation of computerized adaptive testing within a broader digital learning environment. Next Generation Assessment is theorized as an information assemblage that functions according to an axiomatic modeling of numerical data enabling the production and communication of information throughout proliferating data infrastructures in education. We argue that the shift from “becoming a statistic” in disciplinary society to “the becoming-statistic” in control society is facilitating the development of digital learning platforms that risk limiting the conditions for learning in the creative sense of this term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses philosopher Gilles Deleuze's remark on educational assessments and education policies which aims to motivate for measurement and intervention. Topics discussed include mapping of territorialities of human capital via analysis of developments in education policy, role of economic and psychological models in the production of human capital, and discovering the unconscious desire.

This paper examines the promises made in education policy regarding people's future education, employment and social mobility. Specifically, the paper analyses how the term 'potential' functions in education policy texts and discourses to make tacit promises at an affective level. Contemporary education policies often invoke the need to realise personal and national economic potential, and speak of the risk of 'wasted potential', when justifying reform agendas directed at both increasing human capital investment and reducing educational inequity. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, the paper develops a philosophical concept of potential that provides a theoretical framework for the analysis. The aim of the paper is to analyse how the term 'potential' functions in policy to: (a) couple economic and equity purposes for education; and (b) imply a relationship between talent, opportunity and aspiration, and particular a distribution of responsibility between governments and citizens for 'realising potential'. While primarily theoretical, the paper is informed by analyses of interview data and documents in two research projects: (1) a small pilot study of higher education equity policy in England and Australia since the mid-1990s and (2) a study of the expansion of human capital theory and large-scale educational assessments to include non-cognitive skills. The paper diagnoses the potential of 'potential' as a key word in policy and raises questions about the risks of becoming invested in the promises of education to 'realise potential'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]