A state in the Midwest region of the United States passed legislation that ties the advancement of students in the third grade to achieving a level of proficiency on a required state assessment in English. The legislation also ties high school graduation to achieving a level of proficiency on a series of required state assessments in English,…

Research Findings: This article investigates how a sample of families, educators, researchers, advocates, and policymakers (n = 93) made sense of how children are and should be taught in kindergarten. By examining their conceptions of instruction that define kindergarten in this current era of standards and accountability and what opportunities…

National and state-based assessments have been a common practice for the past several decades. These assessments often come with high-stake consequences for students and schools, which tends towards the creation of a test-centric environment where educators prioritize test-based instruction to prepare students to be successful on those…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate Brazilian school teacher attitudes and approaches to biodiversity education. We aim to specifically compare the amount of native biodiversity topics as measured by teachers' reports of their teaching emphasis. The study involved 147 teachers from all geographic regions of the country, who…

This paper focuses on the relationship between policy creation and policy enactment through the use of an innovative qualitative research methodology, photo elicitation. Teachers applying Common Core State Standards were studied in two states through indepth interviews, photographs captured by the participants, and other artifacts. Findings…

This case study investigates writing feedback practices and their relationship to the grammar, punctuation and spelling (GPS) objectives in the 2014 National Curriculum for England, with a particular focus on grammatical metalanguage. Our data is composed of authentic examples of children's writing in three classes at one primary school in the…

Within current educational discourse, dialogic pedagogy is diametrically opposed to "teaching to the test", especially the high-stakes standardised test. While dialogic pedagogy is about critical thinking, authenticity and freedom, test preparation evokes all that is narrow, instrumental and cynical in education. In this paper, we argue…

This article examines the enactment of the policy initiative to promote critical thinking in Singapore schools from the perspectives of educators in Singapore. It is argued that teachers in Singapore are not passive recipients or mere implementers of top-down policy decisions. Rather, they enact the policy initiative by making sense of,…

A fundamental claim for Common Core State Standards (CCSS)-aligned assessments is that they will lead to better teaching practices. The purpose of this study is to seek evidence in support of this claim by surveying teachers about their instructional practices, test preparation strategies, and test score use both before and after the introduction…

Teachers often communicate to students the consequences of success and failure (fear appeals) and the timing (timing reminders) of forthcoming examinations. Prior research has examined how fear appeals and teaching reminders are evaluated by students and how they relate to educational outcomes such as engagement. Few studies have addressed the use…

In Mongolia, teachers' attitudes towards large-scale assessments have been a largely uncovered area. Therefore, this paper focuses on examining the general overview of English language teachers' belief about state-level assessments, and their reflection on teaching practices. Participants of this study were 307 teachers of primary and secondary…

This study used a theoretical framework rooted in student voice to explore the perceptions, experiences, and recommendations of African American students at an elementary school that had implemented a test-centered curriculum. The study used data from focus group interviews conducted with a purposefully selected group of fourth- and fifth-grade…

Critics of test-based accountability warn that test preparation has a negative influence on teachers' instruction due to a focus on procedural skills. Others advocate that the adoption of more rigorous assessments may be a way to incentivize more ambitious test preparation instruction. Drawing on classroom observations and teacher surveys, we do…

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…

Developing fluency in arithmetic facts is instrumental to mathematics learning. This study compares the effects of two practice conditions on children's fluency in simple multiplication facts. Third and fourth graders in the Netherlands (N = 282) practised in either a conventional "recall" condition where they produced answers to…