This article explores the implementation of Kenyan secondary education in rural Western Kenya, focusing on learners' experiences. One of the key challenges to educational quality is shown to be the size and breadth of the secondary education curriculum. Learners are in school 12 hours a day with those approaching their final exams working three to…

This article traces the work of community-based popular educators with an explicit commitment to "Freirean" popular education as they shifted from teaching in a community-based setting to an after-school program focused on standardized test-preparation. Drawing from ethnographic observation and interviews, it examines educators'…

Iran's education system is exam-based and to gain admission to universities at undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate levels, candidates have to sit a competitive examination. For this reason, developing an EAP course which prepares the candidates for these examinations is of crucial importance. The present study attempted to develop an EAP…

Policy makers worldwide are increasingly using high-stakes tests for accountability purposes. This practice has resulted in a considerable rise in test preparation activities in different instructional contexts. The purpose of this study is to investigate teachers' test preparation beliefs and practices in a high-stakes assessment context in…

Students, educators, and schools across the country have been presented with challenges as a result of rigorous standards and high-complexity tests. The problem addressed in this case study was that teachers in a rural middle school in a southeastern state were preparing students to take a new high-stakes state-mandated assessment in English…

In discussions of work-based learning in anglophone countries, a relatively new question concerns different learning opportunities for differentially positioned novices in the workplace. Basil Bernstein relates learners' positioning with respect to knowledge and within a community of knowers to variations in a discourse underlying and regulating…

This article explores three Korean teachers' experiences of carrying out practitioner inquiry as a means of providing meaningful teaching under the test-centred schooling regime in Korea. Practitioner inquiry is a concept that includes multiple genres of educational research such as action research, teacher research, and self-study that aim to…

The specialized literature in the field of education has not focused in what ways the multilingual classroom setting exacerbates teachers' tension concerning the need to comply with standards, on the one hand, and the aspiration to embrace diversity, on the other hand. That is to say, there is a need to understand how teachers adapt to confront…

This paper presents data that consider ways in which young people experience the curriculum through the lens of subject examination syllabuses (for GCSEs), their associated assessment techniques and structures, and educational policies at national and school level concerning subject choice. Drawing upon an original qualitative dataset from a…

Teacher corrective feedback is widely recognised as integral in supporting developing L2 writers. The potentially high pressure IELTS test preparation classroom presents a context where feedback has not yet been extensively studied. Consequently, teachers' approaches to corrective feedback on Writing Task 2, the essay component of IELTS Writing,…

Background/Context: This work contributes to the growing body of scholarly and popular literature on middle-class parental anxiety and competition to ensure their children's academic success. Specifically, this study provides a better understanding of the measures parents will take to obtain high status gifted and talented (G&T) placements…

Taking a student's perspective, this study aims to characterize students' descriptions of teaching higher and lower in mastery goal emphasis, in elementary, middle, traditional, and democratic schools. Data were collected by student surveys and interviews from fifth- through eighth-grade Israeli students. Nineteen interviews, describing 5 science…

Purpose: This study investigates how senior science teachers viewed the effects of a Raising Test Scores policy and its implementation on instruction of higher order thinking (HOT), and on teaching thinking to students with low academic achievements. Background: The study was conducted in the context of three concurrent policies advocating: (a)…

The leadership style in which an educational leader practice may impact the academic achievement of the students enrolled in their school. The specific problem was, when students fail their high-stake test, the educational leader, as well as the school was sanctioned. The purpose of this qualitative study, using a single instrumental case study…

Many medical schools have adopted multiple mini-interviews (MMI) as an advanced selection tool. MMIs are expensive and used to test only a few dozen candidates per day, making it infeasible to develop a different test version for each test administration. Therefore, some items are reused both within and across years. This study investigated the…