Policy Knowledge and Lesson Drawing in Nordic School Reform in an Era of International Comparison

In recent years, evidence-informed policy making has gained substantial traction on the international education agenda. Due to globalization processes, national policymakers are expected to utilize evidence and expertise when setting reform agendas, developing new or modified policy options, or issuing reforms for basic education (1–10). Wide-ranging, ongoing discussions address how to make use of evidence as well as the potential for actors to connect and collaborate to produce this evidence. To achieve this objective, policymakers invite researchers and others with specialized competence, to participate. How policymakers deploy knowledge and use evidence within the normal business of public administrations, is however, an empirical question. In the realm of education policy reform from basic education (1 – 10), the focus of POLNET has been on how policymakers use evidence and expertise to legitimize and coordinate recent school reforms in five Nordic countries. The comparative analysis of the selected reform projects in each country has based on the examination of bibliographic data, full-text documents, and expert interviews. The project examined the frequency of referencing specific types of knowledge sources in parliamentary papers (white papers) and public inquiry commissions (green papers) and in particular how groups of reform documents featured the influence international organisations and large-scale studies by referencing their reports and papers over time. In addition, the project has provided a document study of full-text, digitalized, white, and green papers during 1988 – 2018, published and referenced by the Ministry of Education. The bibliometric and digital semantic analysis provided by the National Library in Norway demonstrates how document clusters reflect word associations and narratives over time. The project finds that references to reports, knowledge reviews, evaluations and other policy-relevant documents have become a common practice in Norwegian education policy. The results show that the average number of references in the NOUs for the school reform Kunnskapsløftet 2020 has more than doubled compared to 2006. This finding can be explained by the increased number of academic experts involved in the research work. The increase applies to the entire reform period of 1988–2019 in the field of education. Correspondingly, there has been an increase in the use of references in reports to the Norwegian parliament. Among international organisations, the OECD has been the leading contributor, both for the two reforms and for all policy areas and educational levels since 1988. However, a closer look reveals that national documents form the most central knowledge base. Finally, expert interviews with policy makers, academics, and other advisors from the five countries deepened themes and questions beyond what could be interpreted from document studies. Norwegian documents refer to significantly more commissioned research reports than Finland, which has the fewest compared to the Nordic countries. Swedish documents have the most references to public documents, while Norway has the fewest. Overall, about a quarter of the sources in the Nordic documents are published outside the Nordic countries. A surprising result is the lack of publications from other Nordic countries. The rationale behind this can be attributed to many factors: the reforms' content; the Nordic publications' lower political and academic standing; and the shared belief that the Nordic countries constitute a natural unit in which knowledge is transmitted through channels other than written documentation. Moreover, no Nordic organisations produce large-scale comparisons proportional to assessment studies, endorsed by international organizations. Beyond the reference analyses, POLNET reveals the indirect influence of OECD data through national documents and coalitions of actors, who are legitimised by this flow of knowledge. In Norway, this coalition consists of higher education institutions, private publishers, national authorities, and international organisations, while in Sweden, the state administration provides the formal framework for international cooperation. POLNET has also made it possible to compare studies from Norway, South Korea, and the USA. It shows that Norwegian and South Korean reference practices are more internationally oriented than corresponding practices in the USA. Despite increased internationalisation, Norwegian reforms are characterised by a socio-corporate tradition in which the state's decision-making processes are shaped via interaction with various interest groups and actors. Against this background, the project concludes that traditional modes of governance continue despite innovation in the use of knowledge and increased international influence.

The research project has explored new methods and instruments for studying evidence-use in national and Nordic education policy. Through a combination of citation and semantic analysis of policy documents and expert interviews, the project has provided new insights into the interaction between knowledge fields and knowledge providers, as well as the direct and indirect influence of experts on the legitimization and coordination of reform policies. The project has also identified institutional differences between systems and practices, as well as various constellations of knowledge providers that both limit and enable international influence. Communication of findings and interpretations has stimulated policy discussions on the characteristics of evidence use in Norway and neighboring countries. It is expected that the database will be expanded and used in further research to investigate the influence of educational expertise, and the impact of media discourse on education reform policies.

In an era of international comparison, policy makers are expected to learn from experiences elsewhere and review "best practices." This project seeks to examine how policy makers use evidence and expertise when setting reform agendas, developing new or modified policy options, or issuing reforms for basic education. The research questions therefore are: how do they draw on regional and/or international knowledge in agenda setting or policy formulation; what counts for them as evidence and expertise, and how do they stabilize and change national school reform by building policy coalitions and learning from best practices? The study is designed as an integrated project and as a joint collaboration by researchers from one US and five Nordic universities. Four bodies of research have informed this study: first, the role of networks within the shift from government to governance; second, the study of "traveling reform," "diffusion" versus "reception" studies; third, the increased reliance on externalization for political coalition-building; and fourth, the use of evidence to reform and improve education. The study applies bibliographical, text-based network analysis to examine policy documents to compare the reception and translations of international, regional, and national policy knowledge and shifts in Norway (from 1988-2020) as well as in the four other Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden). The outcome of our study will enable both policy researchers and policy experts to understand changes in the use of policy tools, notably the use of systematic reviews, evaluations, sector analyses, and OECD- and IEA-type international large-scale assessments (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, etc.). The study will also contribute to foundational policy research on the nexus between local, national, and global policy actors and transnational policy shifts, such as the interpretation and translation of "accountability", "choice," "competency-based curriculum," and "equity."