Datafying education: How digital assessment practices reconfigure the organisation of learning

Abstract

In the past decade, an ever increasing trend to capture (social) life in numbers became a prominent instantiation of the so-called â audit societyâ (Power 1999). With this turn, almost all aspects of social life have become measured and quantified. This datafication of social life raises expectations concerning increased transparency, accountability and civic participation but also associated fears with respect to surveillance, privacy issues, a data literacy divide and control (Kitchin 2014; Borgman 2015; Gitelman 2013). Datafication as a trend of a changing media environment affects many social domains significantly, and one of the most noticeable of these are organisations of education (Piety 2013). It relates for example to schoolsâ performances and student achievements which are compared on a national and international scale; it may affect salaries of teachers and school managers which are adjusted according to test scores as well as decision-making of parents for school choice or communication and control of teachers.