In contemporary society, different tests of educational performance have been given importance in educational research, policy initiatives and curriculum change as well as in media. Consequently, performance in schools has been increasingly judged on the basis of effective student learning outcomes. One of the most active agencies in performing international comparative tests is the IEA—International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. The IEA has a history dating back to the 1950s (for a discussion on the history of the IEA see, e.g., Pettersson, 2014), and since 1995 an international large-scale assessment with the acronym TIMSS repetitively has been launched. TIMSS, together with other tests staged by either the IEA or other international organizations, has gradually transformed into reference points for general economic and social policies (Pettersson, 2014). In this context, the phenomenon of international large-scale assessments (ILSA) are serving a global governance constituted by a specific reasoning (cf. Hacking, 1992) connected to the use of numbers. ILSA research, for example, studies using data or results from TIMSS, is based on numbers constructed for partly governance reasons and is a growing interdisciplinary and increasingly international field of study (Lindblad, Pettersson, & Popkewitz, 2015). Hence, the scientific development of the field is highly relevant to analyze. However, it is surprisingly few educational studies that have made use of the data rapidly accumulating with the development of various databases and software. Given the importance of this numbered educational discourse as a social and scientific practice, we propose that it is crucial to take into account how this discourse is framed through different written formats.