Mathematics education has experienced numerous reforms, including New Math of the 1960s, Back-to-Basics Math of the 1970s, and Standards-Based Math of the 1980s (Herrera & Owens, 2001; Osborne & Crosswhite, 1970). After the nationwide implementation of standards throughout the 1990s (Knight, 2007), Virginia developed high-stakes testing at…

Introduction: High-stake testing plays a crucial role in many educational systems, guiding policies of accountability, resource allocation, and even school choice (OECD, 2013). However, non-representative patterns of attendance can skew how useful these measures are for accomplishing their main objective. Are we really measuring the quality or…

This article introduces the use of public exam questions in fishbowl debate to engage highly exam-oriented secondary students with communicative language teaching (CLT). The practice aims to address the issue that many teachers of English as a second language (ESL)/English as a foreign language (EFL) in Asian contexts either teach to the test or…

The present investigation explores Cognitive Test Anxiety (CTA) in a high-stake oral examination, taking into consideration how face-to-face and computer-based examination formats affect test-takers' anxiety and consequently language performance. Two speaking tests -- face-to-face and computer-based -- were developed for a Spanish university's…

Individuals are controlled by tests in every advanced society when they want to be admitted in educational courses, to proceed from one stage to the next, or to be given a certificate (Shohamy, 2001b). Accordingly, the present study was carried out to construct and validate educational, social, and psychological consequences questionnaires of…

The current study aims to explore the cognitive validity of the iBT TOEFL reading test by investigating test takers' eye movements on individual items. It is assumed that successful test takers would adopt the intended reading processes, the same types and levels of cognitive processes that they would use for real-world reading tasks. Forty-seven…

Mounting criticism suggests that the recent introduction of a 'gatekeeping' test to improve the quality of teachers in Australia--the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE)--has had limited success in achieving its aim. Shaped by a discourse of inputs on how teacher quality might be achieved ('quality in, quality out'),…

As a high-stakes standardized test, IELTS is expected to have comparable forms of test papers so that test takers from different test administration on different dates receive comparable test scores. Therefore, this study examined the text difficulty and task characteristics of four parallel academic IELTS reading tests to reveal to what extent…

This contribution republishes extracts from two important articles published around 2000 concerning the punitive accountability system suffered by English primary and secondary schools. The first concerns the inspection agency Ofsted, and the second managerialism. Though they do not directly address assessment, they are highly relevant to this…

This article explores the effect of high-stakes assessment on the representation of epistemic knowledge in the enacted curriculum--that is, the curriculum experienced by students in the classroom. Epistemic knowledge concerns the processes for constructing and evaluating theories that explain phenomena in the natural and social worlds.…

The current state of technology allows physicians to look up information in everyday practice using a wealth of medical resources. This change in practice may be important enough to consider it being reflected in medical certification exams, making the exam more similar to real practice. However, there is limited research comparing open- and…

The scholarship on school privatization and market-oriented reforms has demonstrated the negative effects on segregation and inequity triggered by this model, not only in Chile but globally. Less is known about how to transition toward a democratic-oriented education approach after decades of embedding the values rooted in a competition-based…

Previous research has examined how subjective task-value and expectancy of success influence the appraisal of value-promoting messages used by teachers prior to high-stakes examinations. The aim of this study was to examine whether message-frame (gain or loss-framed messages) also influences the appraisal of value-promoting messages. Two hundred…

The aim of the study was to conduct a randomized control trial of a targeted, facilitated, test anxiety intervention for a group of adolescent students, and to examine the mediating role of uncertain control. Fifty-six participants (male = 19, white = 21, mean age = 14.7 years) were randomly allocated to an early intervention or wait-list control…

For more than two decades, accommodations have served as the primary strategy for ensuring the valid participation of multilingual learners (MLLs) in high-stakes summative assessments. Using historical analyses of the evolution of testing accommodation guidelines and related instructional practices, the authors explain how the application of…