School authorities, universities, and employers often schedule multiple tests on the same day or week, causing overlapping exam preparation and a dense testing schedule. This multitask learning can be intense, under pressure, and challenge the student's mental and physical perseverance. As a result, it can compromise performance relative to a more…

In many countries in Asia and the Pacific, high-stakes examinations are the means for controlling access to better schools, higher education and greater life opportunities. Students are being educated in a world that is highly competitive, stressful and test-focused and the pressure to obtain high scores in tests and exams can come at the expense…

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 paper reports on an Australian study that explored the costs and benefits of the National Assessment Programme, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing, both tangible and intangible, of Year 9 students in three Queensland schools. The study commenced with a review of pertinent studies and other related material about standardised testing in…

This study explored students' feelings during the Australian National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy. It features student voice depicted as self-drawn images accompanied by words as they journeyed through four phases of the NAPLAN process: preparation, participation, completion and results. The 34 students in Years 3, 5 and 7 attended…

This book explores the influence of high stakes standardised testing within the context of South Korea. South Korea is regarded as a shining example of success in educational achievement and, as this book reveals, pressurised standardised testing has been a major contributing factor to its success. This unique country provides an excellent setting…

The Maine Legislature requested the Maine Education Policy Research Institute (MEPRI) to conduct an assessment of standardized testing in Maine schools to understand the amount, cost, and usefulness of it. This report summarizes the resulting effort, which included a literature scan, document analysis, and surveys of two groups of school…

The purpose of the research is to investigate the behaviour of school personnel under two assessment-reporting conditions and school functioning when faced with the choice of excelling in high-stakes tests or catering to local educational needs. The functioning of 60 schools was compared in terms of their preparation for high-risk external tests…

The article presents a longitudinal study of an urban charter middle school to examine the impact testing pressures can have on the education of students with disabilities and English language learners, and how this may lead to a narrowing of the content they are taught. The study examines various sources of data, including the school's evolving…

The inevitable responses to high stakes testing, wherein students' test scores are highly consequential for teachers and administrators, include cheating, excessive test preparation, changes in test scoring and other forms of gaming to ensure that test scores appear high. Over the last decade this has been demonstrated convincingly in the USA, but…

Preparation for high-stakes testing, while unavoidable, may become meaningful, these authors argue. The article illustrates the case of a third-grade classroom in a metropolitan public school, where test preparation was approached as genre study. In addition to examining the specific unit of study, the authors describe the efforts of the classroom…

Even though it often feels like standardized testing is a relatively recent phenomena, it has been around at least since the 1800s, when in China, those that wanted a government job were required to take a test on their expertise of Confucian philosophy and poetry. During the Industrial Revolution, standardized tests were a quick way to test large…

With the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act in January of 2002, curricula in high schools in the United States have adjusted to make room for test preparation activities and high stakes testing. This involves teaching skills and content in the format of the test only, drilling students on specific skills and content areas that will be…

In a developing nation like Turkey, the English language plays a significant role in educational and socioeconomic mobility. English is acquired and taught as a foreign language (EFL) primarily in the classrooms. However, the ways in which English language is represented in classroom instruction have been hardly examined and understood. With that,…

This multicase study investigated the impact of high-stakes testing on the literacy practices of teachers of high school English language learners (ELLs) in three Long Island, New York, school districts, in one of the most racially and socioeconomically segregated regions of the United States. The goal of the study was to explore what kinds of…