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…

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…

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…

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…

The challenge for many teachers teaching in academic English programs is, on the one hand, to actualize the objectives of their course and on the other hand, prepare their students for the important international tests such as IELTS and TOEFL. The current study seeks to reconcile this challenge by drawing on the relationship between the IELTS…

University education has been massified in South Africa and this has disrupted conventions and practices of assessment. Universities are perceived as promoting complex achievements and complex skills through rigorous curriculum specifications and assessment instruments. Due to experiences in high school and the novelty of university education,…

This qualitative study explored educators' sense making of and responses to No Child Left Behind and the Common Core State Standards at one urban Expeditionary Learning middle school. Sense-making theory (Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002) and inquiry as stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) were used as complementary conceptual frameworks…

Over the last several decades, suburban schools have become increasingly more diverse and now must respond to racial change, so that they can successfully educate an increasingly more diverse and multiracial student body. This article analyzes interview responses of administrators, teachers, and staff at 19 schools in six diversifying suburban…

Test takers' beliefs or experiences have been overlooked in most validation studies in language education. Meanwhile, a mutual exclusion has been observed in the literature, with little or no dialogue between validation studies and studies concerning the uses and consequences of testing. To help fill these research gaps, a group of Senior III…

The use of integrated skills tasks in language tests has been debated for many years and international English test developers such as Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Pearson Tests of English (PTE) already use such tests to assess English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' language proficiency. Empirical research has rarely investigated…