Introduction

Abstract

Over the past few years, high-stakes testing has grown in importance in a number of international contexts. In some cases, it is used as the primary means of assessing students and evaluating teacher performance. As a powerful educational driver, high-stakes testing is sometimes seen as divorced from the reality of the classroom, so much so that “the pressures of assessment systems…pay little heed to consistency or coherence between teachers’ visions of desirable education and those articulated in high-stakes examinations” (Atkin 2007, p. 57). These pressures not only affect classroom practices but they also disempower teachers. In fact, Reich and Bally (2010) argue that high-stakes testing makes teachers “increasingly feel that they are at the mercy of forces beyond their control” (p. 181). This has led to accusations that high-stakes testing engenders social and educational inequality (Au 2008), and that it is mechanistic and reductive (Allen 2012). High-stakes tests have been branded “oppressive” because they “undermine quality teaching and learning, and…make students vulnerable in the classroom to a narrowly focused curriculum in which teachers teach to the test” (Grant 2004, p. 6). High-stakes tests have the power to change teachers’ instructional practices (Hoffman et al. 2001) and to influence the way they respond to students’ learning needs (Flores and Clark 2003; Pennington 2004). Partly for these reasons, Nichols’ (2007) review questions whether high-stakes tests enhance student learning.