High-stakes Testing Environment Research Articles

Some Impact of the English Competence Assessment Test Based on Output Standards on English Teaching at Tan Trao University

The standardized English proficiency assessment has yielded significant and positive impacts on the English teaching and learning processes at Tan Trao University. This assessment not only serves as a tool to evaluate students' English proficiency but also constitutes an integral component of the educational process, encompassing curriculum design and instructional methodologies. One of the paramount effects of this assessment is the establishment of clear standards regarding proficiency levels and requisite skills. This initiative provides educators and students with a precise understanding of the competencies required for English language acquisition. Consequently, the university can devise tailored language programs that ensure students are equipped with the necessary skills to thrive in academic and professional environments. Furthermore, the assessment instills a sense of pressure on students as they prepare and engage in a high-stakes testing environment. However, this pressure serves as a motivator for students to enhance their individual English proficiency. Consequently, students are propelled towards autonomy and responsibility in their English language learning endeavors, whether through supplemental coursework or independent study. the assessment fosters improvements in the quality of English language instruction at the university. Educators must possess comprehensive knowledge of the assessment's content and requisite skills, prompting them to explore and implement effective pedagogical strategies. This results in a diversification of teaching methodologies, ranging from the utilization of extensive learning resources to the organization of practical activities and classroom discussions.

Setting standards for a diagnostic test of aviation English for student pilots

Standard-setting is an essential component of test development, supporting the meaningfulness and appropriate interpretation of test scores. However, in the high-stakes testing environment of aviation, standard-setting studies are underexplored. To address this gap, we document two stages in the standard-setting procedures for the Overseas Flight Training Preparation Test (OFTPT), a diagnostic English test for ab initio pilots, aligned to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)’s Language Proficiency Rating Scale (LPRS). Performance-level descriptors (PLDs) were empirically generated in Stage 1 in collaboration with six subject matter experts (SMEs). These PLDs made explicit the correspondence between linguistic performance levels within the target language use domain and the ICAO scale. Findings suggest that the ICAO scale is not fine-grained enough to distinguish levels of linguistic readiness among ab initio pilots, nor does it adequately reflect the knowledge, skills, and abilities valued by SMEs within this domain. In Stage 2, 12 SMEs were recruited to set standards and were divided into two groups to investigate the replicability of Ebel method standard-setting procedures. Cut scores were determined for the OFTPT reading and listening tests, which were inferentially linked to the LPRS. There were no significant differences in the cut scores arrived at by both groups and reliability was excellent, suggesting that test users can have confidence in the standards set.

Individual differences in self-regulated learning profiles of Chinese EFL readers: A sequential explanatory mixed-methods study

AbstractThis study explored the latent profiles of self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies (cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational regulation) endorsed by Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) readers in a high-stakes testing environment, and also their associations with individual factors (gender, grade, reading proficiency, and motivational beliefs). With a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, students in grades 11 and 12 (n = 1,113) completed a reading comprehension test and a questionnaire regarding their strategy use and individual factors, and some (n = 16) were randomly selected for follow-up semi-structured interviews. Findings revealed three SRL profiles, characterized by high, medium, and low levels of SRL-strategy use. Self-efficacy and extrinsic motivation most powerfully predicted an individual’s profile membership; all the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation variables were significantly higher for learners from the higher strategy-use profile. Moreover, reading proficiency did not significantly predict profile membership, but more self-regulated students still achieved higher reading scores as a group tendency.

Different or Differentiated? Recoupling Policy and Practice in an Era of Accountability

Differentiation is an instructional practice teachers employ to modify their classroom content, process, and products based on student readiness, interest, and learning profile. Many school districts recognize the benefits of differentiated instruction and thus mandate allotted classroom time for its implementation. In this article, we investigate how teachers in one such district resolved differentiation policy to practice in a high-stakes testing environment. We found, during the designated time for differentiation, teachers regularly remediated small groups but did not similarly address the academic needs of advanced students, thus not enacting the disciplinary standard for differentiation. We suggest teachers are recoupling practice and policy but misaligning it to the disciplinary definition of differentiation, which we contend has broader implications for instructional policymaking.

Critical Awareness for Literacy Teachers and Educators in Troubling Times

The field of literacy remains assailed by a persisting discrepancy between an increasing body of literacy research that honors the diversity in students’ practices juxtaposed against a persistent system of schooling and high-stakes assessment that has not been designed to draw from underrepresented students’ literate assets. This discrepancy has created a situation where teachers often receive well-intentioned instruction from literacy educators about how to address diverse literacy needs, but then, struggle to enact this instruction in the high-stakes testing environment of classrooms and schools where they have little autonomy. We argue in this essay that critical multilingual, critical multicultural and critical racial awareness on the part of literacy teachers and educators can serve as a basis for enhancing cultural and linguistic responsiveness in literacy classrooms. We invite the field to use these forms of awareness to engage with the racial, linguistic, and cultural predispositions of the self as a basis for engaging in responsiveness to and with the "Other".

Effect of Perceived Job-Related Stress on Teacher Job Satisfaction in a High-Stakes Testing Environment

Public demand for high scores in the nationwide high-stakes test, that is, Basic Education Certificate Examination places Ghanaian teachers in a position to experience high amount of stress since they are to work harder to ensure that the demand is realized. The main aim of the study was to investigate effect of teachers perceived job-related stress on their job satisfaction. Using public Junior High School teachers in the Kwahu South District as the target population, 120 of them from public 20 schools were selected using proportionate stratified sampling technique with a common ratio of 4:10 (0.4). An adapted high-stakes testing questionnaire was used to collect data from the respondents. Variance based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), specifically, Partial Least Square (PLS) model was used to validate the instrument and to test the study hypothesis 1. Independent samples t-test as well as means and standard deviations were used in the analysis of the data to test the hypothesis 2 and answer the research question respectively. Findings revealed teacher Job-related stress as a significant predictor of job satisfaction in a high-stakes testing environment. Implications are provided for policy and practice.

Children’s wellbeing in a high-stakes testing environment: The case of Hong Kong

The current literature on the impact of high-stakes testing largely focuses on Western countries, is adult-centric, and mainly considers the impact on teaching and learning. This study not only examines the learning experiences of children, but also other aspects of their wellbeing, including their social relationships, leisure activities, and health, in the high-stakes testing environment of Hong Kong, from the perspectives of children. A qualitative approach using focus group interviews was employed to listen to the views of primary school children. The children’s perceptions of the school learning environment revealed the negative consequences of high-stakes tests, with major findings concerning skewed curricula, the spillover of major subjects, major subject-centered scheduling, undermining recess, exam-oriented pedagogy, endless homework and drilling, and overemphasis on grades. The findings also show that children’s wellbeing is jeopardized in this environment, with major themes including schoolwork as a source of family conflict, distant relationships with teachers, friendship as a comfort zone (though it may be hampered by competition), no real leisure time, deprived sleep, enduring pressure and stress, and overall happiness reduced by academic study. Implications of the findings are discussed. Besides the short-term measures of improving children’s experience in learning and wellbeing, reforming the educational system to be less emphasizing academic achievement and making student wellbeing a policy priority can be the long-term strategies.

Finding and Enacting Agency: An Elementary ESL Teacher’s Perceptions of Teaching and Learning in the Era of Standardized Testing

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article is to examine how a first-grade ESL teacher understands teaching and learning as she explores her agency (and that of her students) in implementing and experimenting with project-based instruction (PBI) in her economically, culturally, and linguistically diverse classroom. Utilizing video-cued ethnography and drawing on teacher agency, pedagogy of hope, and identity in discourse, we explore how the process of implementing PBI and opportunities for reflection supported this teacher in examining her teaching approach while teaching in a high-stakes testing environment. Data suggested that when teachers have the professional agency to embrace more dynamic teaching practices without fear of failing, they can discover spaces to enact agency, extend agentic opportunities to their students, and create classrooms of hope, especially for marginalized communities in this era of standardization.

Smart girls traversing assemblages of gender and class in Australian secondary mathematics classrooms

ABSTRACTI examine experiences of former Australian schoolgirls in relation to mathematics during secondary school. This research scrutinises misunderstandings about success and impact on subject choice that can result in post-schooling trajectories that limit what girls can do in their lives beyond school. I examine ways affective relationality, as a sense of embodied belonging, may influence participation in subjects. I frame the discussion using the Baradian concept of intra-action, a co-production that engages an ethic of non-coincidence. For these participants, a reductive high-stakes testing environment and aspirations to become a master subject evoke a powerful not good enough assemblage. The responsibility to achieve enough success incites a soliciting of a particular self in affective regulation. The dread of not excelling in mathematics was often too much to endure thus participants chose to discontinue studying mathematics. They understood this as a sensible solution to prevent vulnerability, as not good enough.

The Ethical Teacher in a High-Stakes Testing Environment

Increasing accountability expectations are causing teachers to rectify their responsibilities, to themselves, to their students and to the school administrations in which they work. Teachers have been torn between the responsibility to provide a quality education that reflects their knowledge and their training in their content area and to prepare their students for mandated assessments. State and District mandated assessments can have an impact on the delivery and the content of the curriculum in the classroom. These assessments can be the impetus for teachers to make specific decisions regarding the focus of their instruction and the delivery of their content. Teachers often feel obligated to emphasize the testing information at the expense of the specific curricula content. This adjustment in their curriculum can create an ethical dilemma for the teacher with regard to the emphasis of their instruction and the delivery of their instruction.Discussed in the manuscript are the perceptions of two teachers regarding curriculum planning and the implementation of the curriculum. The relationship between teacher perception, ethical concepts and the implementation of instruction in the high stakes testing environment were explored in the study. The results of the study indicated that the teachers in the study felt obligated to provide a quality education for their students. However, the results also indicated that the pressures of the mandated assessment did have an effect on the delivery and preparation of their instruction. This decision to compromise created an ethical dilemma for the teachers in the study.

Critical Aspects of Stress in a High-Stakes Testing Environment: A Phenomenographical Approach.

A high-stakes examination is any examination used for tracking or determining promotion or graduation. Therefore, when used as a basis for progression or graduation in nursing, standardized examinations become high stakes for students. High-stakes testing in nursing is a focal stimulus that has been shown to contribute to the negative consequences associated with stress. The adverse effects of stress have the potential to result in unhealthy coping behaviors such as isolation, withdrawal, decreased motivation, and decreased self-efficacy. Phenomenography was used to capture the various ways in which students experience stress. Six major categories of description emerged. All students experienced stress in relation to high-stakes testing. However, student interviews revealed that students experienced the stress in myriad ways, ranging from fear of not graduating to social isolation and withdrawal. Although it is known that high-stakes testing contributes to the development of stress, this study provides evidence of the need for nursing programs to consider the implementation of supportive measures as a means to mitigate student stress and foster student success.

Representing teachers as criminals in the news: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Atlanta schools’ “Cheating Scandal”

ABSTRACTOn 1 April 2015, 11 Atlanta teachers accused of changing answers on their students’ standardized tests were convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 5–20 years in prison. Despite ample news coverage, few sources investigated teachers’ motivations for altering students’ responses or explored what the consequences would have been if student scores had not been changed to passing. Moreover, the fact that the teachers’ actions resulted from systemic problems associated with working within a high-stakes testing environment is glossed over and all but lost in the reporting of the “Cheating Scandal” events. The authors conduct a critical multimodal analysis of how semiotic resources were used to represent teachers in the Atlanta “Cheating Scandal” and show how the media's framing of teachers both reflects and conceals specific interests of the powerful educational reform movement and the corporations that benefit from it, such as Pearson, Inc. Data sources included four online news sources from April 2015 that covered the teachers’ sentencing, and the authors analyzed the visual and verbal transformations that occurred during the process of recontextualization. Analysis revealed the construction of a moral narrative that depicted the teachers as selfish and incompetent, reinforcing the dominant paradigm driving school reform in the USA. The authors conclude by calling for more counter-narratives that expose how dominant representations reify negative public perceptions of teachers.

Examining a Public Montessori School’s Response to the Pressures of High-Stakes Accountability

<p style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"> </p><p style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: medium;">In order to succeed in the current school assessment and accountability era, a public Montessori school is expected to achieve high student scores on standardized assessments. A problem for a public Montessori elementary school is how to make sense of the school’s high-stakes assessment scores in terms of its unique educational approach. This case study examined a public Montessori elementary school’s efforts as the school implemented the Montessori Method within the accountability era. The research revealed the ways the principal, teachers, and parents on the school council modified Montessori practices, curriculum, and assessment procedures based on test scores. A quality Montessori education is designed to offer children opportunities to develop both cognitive skills and affective components such as student motivation and socio-emotional skills that will serve them beyond their public school experiences. Sadly, the high-stakes testing environment influences so much of public education today. When quality education was measured through only one narrow measure of success the result in this school was clearly a restriction of priorities to areas that were easily assessed. </span></p><p style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"> </p>

Growing the Good Stuff

This ethnographic study reports on one elementary literacy coach’s response to high-stakes testing and her approach to support third- through fifth-grade teachers in a Title I school in Texas. Sources of data included field notes and observations of classes and meetings, audio/video recordings, and transcribed interviews. The findings illustrate how the literacy coach used her knowledge and beliefs about teaching reading along with her position of leadership to craft alternative responses to an environment that endorsed a skills-based approach to teaching reading and placed a strong emphasis on test preparation. Specifically, the literacy coach enriched the skills-based reading curriculum with reading workshop, supported teachers’ learning and growth with teacher-centered inquiry groups, and focused on language and authentic literature as a way of preparing students for the test. These findings suggest that the literacy coach played an important role in supporting teachers with negotiating the demands of a high-stakes testing environment and in ways that did not necessarily compromise the literacy coach’s beliefs. These findings also suggest the importance of a supportive school environment where teachers have a sense of community for support and professional growth.

A Dispositional Approach to Applicant Reactions: Examining Core Self-Evaluations, Behavioral Intentions, and Fairness Perceptions

Drawing from core self-evaluations (CSE) theory, we argue and demonstrate that disposition plays an important role in explaining the way job applicants respond to testing procedures in the selection process. We demonstrate that CSE predicts job candidate reapplication intentions, acceptance intentions, and recommendation intentions—even after controlling for test performance. Moreover, we show that CSE moderates the relationship between perceived fairness and applicant behavioral intentions. Drawing from a sample of 194 applicants for the position of police officer, this research uses data at four different time periods to explain the impact that applicant CSE has on outcomes in a high-stakes (i.e., civil service) testing environment. Our results indicate that behavioral intentions resulting from selection processes are attributable at least in part to applicant CSE and that self-serving attributions are not the only relevant driving factor. We also show that CSE influences the relationship between perceptions of fairness and behavioral intentions. Theoretically, this manuscript explains why and shows how CSE is a driving force behind intention formation. This research provides practitioners with insight to the formation of applicant reactions and intentions showing that important perceptions about the organization can be impacted by CSE. We also demonstrate that CSE impacts selection test performance. This is the first study to examine the impact of CSE on applicant responses related to the formation of organizationally relevant outcomes

Contrasting State-of-the-Art in the Machine Scoring of Short-Form Constructed Responses

This study compared short-form constructed responses evaluated by both human raters and machine scoring algorithms. The context was a public competition on which both public competitors and commercial vendors vied to develop machine scoring algorithms that would match or exceed the performance of operational human raters in a summative high-stakes testing environment. Data (N = 25,683) were drawn from three different states, employed 10 different prompts, and were drawn from two different secondary grade levels. Samples ranging in size from 2,130 to 2,999 were randomly selected from the data sets provided by the states and then randomly divided into three sets: a training set, a test set, and a validation set. Machine performance on all of the agreement measures failed to match that of the human raters. The current study concluded with recommendations on steps that might improve machine-scoring algorithms before they can be used in any operational way.

Accountable to Whom? Teacher Reflections on the Relationship Between Creativity and Standardized Testing in Ontario

This paper describes the reactions and emotions teachers experienced when asked to discuss the impact standardized achievement testing in Ontario has on creative classroom practices. Using an interview guide format, eight teachers were asked to consider their perspectives on, and practices related to fostering creative behaviours in children, and their own creative teaching methods in light of accountability legislation. The responses teachers provided varied from bitterness and disappointment with the way standardized achievement testing influences their schools and classrooms to acceptance and optimism for the children’s future academic success. The results of this examination are framed with reference to accountability legislation in Canada and the United States, and the potential lasting effects of a high-stakes testing environment.

Not Too Young to Lead

Educational leadership is a term used to describe the work of principals and administrators. The high-stakes testing environment that has been feeding the culture of accountability in our schools has led principals to increasingly turn to a more distributed leadership model that includes their teachers, thereby expanding the concept of leadership in our schools. Despite increasing opportunities to lead, a lack of formal training often leaves educators hesitant to see themselves as leaders. Therefore, there is a compelling need to address leadership development among America's teachers even as early as the preservice stage because beginning teachers are not too young to lead. Preservice programs provide numerous opportunities to begin to expose teachers to these ideas and give them the key knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to engage in formal and informal leadership roles early in their careers. Promoting teacher leadership among beginning teachers may improve retention in teachers in the induction stage, as well as assist in closing a looming gap in leadership in our schools as many veteran teacher leaders of the baby boomer generation approach retirement.

A study of secondary school English teachers’ beliefs in the context of curriculum reform in China

This study examines the beliefs of Chinese junior high school English teachers about foreign language teaching and influencing contextual factors in a time when curriculum innovation is confronting deep-rooted cultural traditions and complex teaching realities. Drawing upon data collected by means of questionnaires and interviews, this study reveals a multi-dimensional structure of teachers’ beliefs. On the whole, teachers’ beliefs are congruent with the constructivism-oriented curriculum reform, but a closer examination suggests that both traditional and constructivist beliefs exist. Constructivist beliefs favour student participation, interactive class, and learning strategy training while traditional beliefs involve focus on grammar and language form, drill and practice, rote memorization, and teacher authority. A variety of contextual factors are found to exert a strong influence on teachers’ beliefs, such as Confucian culture, curriculum reform, high-stakes testing, and school environment. These factors interact to facilitate or constrain the development of teachers’ beliefs. The study highlights the situated nature of teachers’ beliefs with implications for curriculum reform, teacher development and many other important issues in secondary foreign language education in China and other similar contexts internationally.

Using Simulations to Teach Middle Grades U.S. History in an Age of Accountability

In this year-long qualitative study we explore the case of two eighth grade U.S. History teachers who use simulations on a regular basis to teach heterogeneously-grouped students in a high-stakes testing environment. We describe the purposes the teachers espoused for implementing simulations and provide detailed portraits of three types of simulations used: role-play, game, and trial. We argue that because the ambitious teachers know their discipline well, see the potential of all their students, and feel that learning rather than testing should drive instructional decision-making, they are able to engage and challenge their students with historical simulations. This study adds to the sparse field of simulation research and to the emerging literature on ambitious history teaching. It also shows educators what is pedagogically possible in teaching history.