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Capital and capabilities in education: Re-examining Australia’s 2015 PISA performance and context assessment framework

journal contribution
posted on 2019-01-01, 00:00 authored by L Pham
This paper offers a conceptual framework that combines Sen’s concept of capability and Bourdieu’s forms of capital to understand the generative mechanisms of educational advantage or disadvantage. The paper illustrates some ways that the Sen–Bourdieu framework can be applied to understand the Programme for International Student Assessment 2015 results and measures of educational contexts for Australia. The Programme for International Student Assessment 2015 results indicated that students’ socioeconomic background and student-level and school-level factors affect their educational performance. Guided by the proposed framework, the paper explains some of these effects and the contexts in which they occur. It suggests educational disadvantages are attributable to economic capital and other forms of capital within broader structural, representational and relational contexts of schooling practices. The implications for improving equity in education are to recognise forms of capital that enable or limit students’ educational capabilities, identify contexts and schooling practices in which such enablers or limitations occur, and improve opportunities as well as processes in schools in ways that secure students’ differences and uniqueness.

History

Journal

Policy Futures in Education

Volume

17

Pagination

599-617

Location

London, Eng.

ISSN

1478-2103

eISSN

1478-2103

Language

English

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Issue

5

Publisher

Sage