In neoliberal times, accountability measures and high-stakes testing further contribute to differentiated outcomes for young people. The way that knowledge is conceptualised in tests regularly fails to recognise the embodied knowledge and abilities of many young people and instead students are positioned as passive receivers of knowledge. Students…

The modalities of performance ranking in high stakes testing to a greater extent affect Mathematics teaching and learning. While performance ranking has the potential of being a critical catalyst in the process of making Mathematics classrooms a place of positive competition, it fails to balance the most crucial aspects in Mathematics…

The 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…

Academic tracking is a common feature of school organization, but it produces inequalities in student outcomes. High-stakes testing policies offer new opportunities for assessing students' progress, but the instruments raise concerns about relying on such narrow measures of learning. This study utilizes a longitudinal data set that follows one…

This article responds to two key concerns in science education: firstly, that policies designed to assess practical work have distorted its use as an effective pedagogical tool. Secondly, it addresses concerns about the lack of research on the assessment of practical work. The article analyses the policy trajectory for the assessment of science…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and their associated high-stakes testing are key parts of the federal Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative. There has been considerable resistance to both CCSS and related testing, particularly from conservative actors. This resistance suggests that CCSS has caused substantial tension within the conservative…

Debates continue about how high-stakes testing regimes influence schools at all levels: their impact on teaching practices, distribution of resources and curriculum provision, and whether they achieve the intended increases in student achievement in targeted areas. In 2008, the Australian government Introduced a national testing scheme, the"…

High stakes testing is popularly examined in educational research, but contemporary analyses tend to reflect a qualitative or quantitative research design (e.g., Au, 2007; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2006; Gamble, 2010). Exhaustive debate over the relative success or failure of high stakes testing is often framed between competing visions of…

This article investigates children's elementary school experiences, exploring how they become autonomous, rational individuals--the type of person envisioned in the European Enlightenment and generally imagined as the outcome of Western schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research that followed one cohort of Latinx children across five years, we…

With the proliferation of test-based accountability policies, educators and students alike are under pressure to improve test performance. However, little is known regarding the stress experienced by educators in response to these policies. The purpose of this article is to describe the initial development and validation of a new measure of stress…

Career and Technical Education (CTE) is hot topic and trend in education; in part because of the increased demand from Americans to include CTE programs and opportunities in schools along with increased federal funding to build new CTE programs and improve existing ones. Today's schools are faced with pressure to improve the student achievement.…

Connecticut experienced two major changes in testing policy for children with disabilities that played a major role in conclusions about educational progress in the state. First, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 required that all students with disabilities participate in grade-level, standardized tests. This movement of students…

The Jomtien conference in 1990 on Education for All is seen by many as a turning point for the introduction of increased monitoring and evaluation of the quality of education systems around the world. Internationally, debates have arisen about the nature and frequency of assessment and its impact on education systems with its intended and…

Several teacher models exist for using high-stakes testing outcomes to make continuous employment decisions for principals. These models are reviewed, and specific flaws are noted if these models are retrofitted for principals. To address these flaws, a different methodology is proposed on the basis of actual field data. Specially addressed are…

For more than two decades, the New York Performance Standards Consortium, a coalition of 38 public high schools, has steered clear of high-stakes testing, which superficially assess student learning. Instead, the consortium's approach relies on performance-based assessments--essays, research papers, science experiments, and high-level mathematical…