Background: Policymakers' use of high-stakes exams to improve students' academic achievement affects teachers and their tenure in the field at all levels of schooling. Novice teachers now being inducted into the field have been educated almost exclusively in these high-stakes learning environments. Yet, how their familiarity with these contexts…

In this paper, we expose the unique challenges confronting graduate field-ecology students and the coping strategies they adopt to overcome such challenges. To do so, we used a qualitative ("in vivo") research method that combines interviews, observations and open questionnaires with a group of five Israeli graduate students. The two…