High-stakes reading tests significantly influence one's future success, leading many second language learners to engage in intensive test preparation. This study examines nine TOEFL reading preparation lectures from two popular cram schools, or [foreign characters omitted] "hagwons," in Korea, with a total duration of five hours and…

'School league tables' summarising the performance of secondary schools in England have been published annually since 1992. Although now a firmly established feature of the educational landscape, they have attracted criticism from those who point to their unintended negative consequences. These include 'teaching to the test', entering pupils for…

This study aimed to explore the relationship between students' understanding of the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) and their learning practices through standard multiple regression (SMR) and structural equation modeling (SEM) with the purpose of unraveling the working mechanism of washback. A total number of 3105 Chinese senior high…

What 'sources' of knowledge do higher education students draw on, to prepare for exams? And has the pandemic made any difference? The study presented in this paper addresses these questions, in the belief that gaining awareness of the sources through which students learn is important for the instructional design of the courses and the evaluation…

Performance on the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) is the primary criterion for university admission in South Korea. High-school seniors typically spend 60 hours or more per week preparing for the CSAT. Private tutoring for the CSAT accounts for nearly 2% of the Korean economy. These investments signify the high stakes attached to the CSAT.…

There now exists an established body of work outlining the challenges international students can face as part of the acculturation process, including a range of academic and non-academic pressures to overcome. For many students, writing essays in academic English for the first time is problematic. This article considers pedagogical approaches for…

The objective of this research was to develop and present a model preparing teacher students for the examination to obtain a teacher license in accordance with the competency criteria of the Teachers' Council of Thailand (TCT). The research comprised the following 5 steps: 1) formulating a conceptual framework; 2) studying the needs and…

The study examined challenges EFL teachers in Burkina Faso face in teaching listening and speaking to grade 10 students in centralized education systems and how they address these issues. The primary obstacle is the focus on national exam formats, which prioritize grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, sidelining communicative language…

In this study, the evaluation of mathematical proficiency (MP) in one NSW Year 12 standardised exam paper was investigated. By considering the multi-strand model of MP, a literature-based criteria for scoring the assessment of MP in individual exam questions was first developed. The criteria were then applied to quantitatively evaluate the 2023…

In the context of examination-oriented education and the pressure of college entrance examinations (known as the "Gaokao"), Chinese high school students often experience academic burnout. Previous research has shown that effort-reward imbalance (ERI) is an important predictor of academic burnout among high school students, but the…

Research on Portuguese language exams in the language assessment field remains scarce. To bridge this gap, this study examined washback from the large-scale, high-stakes Portuguese proficiency tests created by the Center of Evaluation of Portuguese as a Foreign Language ("Centro de Avaliação de Português Língua Estrangeira," or CAPLE as…

Test preparation has been shown to affect educational test scores to varying degrees. In language testing, however, there are no cross-regional studies that consider the effects of gender and age on test preparation practices. This study represents an attempt to remedy this situation. Questionnaire respondents to a global survey were tasked with…

This qualitative case study aimed to examine pre-service teachers' and teacher educators' interactions during their English grammar lessons via the WhatsApp platform. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) model was employed to categorize the WhatsApp interactions based on social, cognitive and teacher presences. Participants wrote their reflections for…

Over the decades, extensive research efforts have been directed towards classifying and evaluating motivational teaching behaviours. Recent calls in motivational research, however, have emphasised the need to investigate teachers' perspectives on how they develop effective motivational strategies so that implications for motivational teaching are…

This study investigates washback effects of IELTS test on university teachers' adoption of teaching materials in the classroom in China and see how a high-stake language exam affects their teaching practices and how they and their students perceive the effectiveness of the pedagogic adjustments. To this end, individual interview to five teacher…