The impact of high-stakes testing on curriculum and pedagogy: a teacher perspective from Australia

Polesel, John; Rice, Suzanne; Dulfer, Nicky

doi:10.1080/02680939.2013.865082

Cited by 159 publications

(94 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…for example, Polesel et al (2014) cite: limitation on learning appropriate for the modern world (Au, 2008), promotion of shallow and superficial learning (Lobascher, 2011), 'cramming' for tests (Cunningham & Sanzo, 2002), shift to competitive and individualistic approaches (Reay & Wiliam, 1999), teachers operating as technicians (Hargreaves, 1994) and reduction in curriculum responsiveness to cultural difference (Klenowski, 2010(Klenowski, , 2011. In the meeting, stakeholders focused on curbs to teacher creativity in content and pedagogy and student reactions.…”

Section: Teaching To the Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the USA, researchers investigating the impact of 'test-based metrics' (Henig, 2013), mainly through theoretical (Au, 2008(Au, , 2011, metasynthesis (Au, 2007), national (Pedulla et al, 2003) or state-based enquiries, include Abrams (2004), Baker et al (2010), Barrett (2009), Darling-Hammond (2010), Hursch (2013, Lipman (2013);and Perreault (2000). Examples of Australian contributions to the field range from global (Lingard, martino, & Rezai-Rashti, 2013;Sellar and Lingard 2013) to national (Dulfer, Polesel, & Rice, 2012;Polesel, Rice, & Dulfer, 2014;Lingard, Sellar, & Savage, 2014;Lingard, 2011;Lingard, Creagh, & Vass, 2012) and state (Thompson, 2012) and finally school enquiries such as Comber (2012), Comber andnixon (2009), Singh, Thomas, andHarris, (2013), Gerrard and farrell (2013) and Keddie (2013). Recent English studies, such as Perryman (2006), Braun, Ball, maguire, and Hoskins (2011), Ball, maguire, Braun, and Hoskins (2011a, 2011b and maguire, Hoskins, focus on school policy enactment, with Ball (2003) and Leat, Livingston, and Priestley (2014) researching the national picture.…”

Section: Part 1: Performativity High-stakes Testing and Dataficationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Curriculum policy reform in an era of technical accountability: ‘fixing’ curriculum, teachers and students in English schools

Winter

2017

Journal of Curriculum Studies

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Drawing on a Levinasian ethical perspective, the argument driving this paper is that the technical accountability movement currently dominating the educational system in England is less than adequate because it overlooks educators' responsibility for ethical relations in responding to difference in respect of the other. Curriculum policy makes a significant contribution to the technical accountability culture through complicity in performativity, high-stakes testing and datafication, at the same time as constituting student and teacher subjectivities. I present two different conceptualizations of subjectivity and education, before engaging these in the analysis of data arising from an empirical study which investigated teachers' and stakeholders' experiences of curriculum policy reform in 'disadvantaged' English schools. The study's findings demonstrate how a prescribed programme of technical curriculum regulation attempts to 'fix' or mend educational problems by 'fixing' or prescribing educational solutions. This not only denies ethical professional relations between students, teachers and parents, but also deflects responsibility for educational success from government to teachers and hastens the move from public to private educational provision. Complying with prescribed curriculum policy requirements shifts attention from broad philosophical and ethical questions about educational purpose as well as conferring a violence by assuming control over student and teacher subjectivities.

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Section: Teaching To the Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Part 1: Performativity High-stakes Testing and Dataficationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Curriculum policy reform in an era of technical accountability: ‘fixing’ curriculum, teachers and students in English schools

Winter

2017

Journal of Curriculum Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As a result, curriculum leaders and teachers typically make the choice to devote more classroom time to the subjects being tested than to curricula areas not directly assessed (Berliner, 2011;Moon, Brighton, Jarvis, & Hall, 2007;Musoleno & White, 2010). Such curricula narrowing has become an everyday consequence of the use of high stakes testing to assess schools' and teachers' performance (Au, 2011;Polesel, Rice, & Duffer, 2014).…”

Section: Review Of Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Exclusion of the Creative Arts from Contracted School Curricula for Teaching the Common Core Standards

Gormley¹,

McDermott²

2017

Journal for Learning through the Arts

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“…The consequences of every point communicating with every other point in a global education topology are not those that a local discursive topology can entertain. (Hursh, 2008;Polesel, Rice, & Dulfer, 2013), and the unedifying spectacle of countries 'competing' in some global education race based on rankings (Lingard, Martino, & Rezai-Rashti, 2013).…”

Section: Database Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Becoming-topologies of education: deformations, networks and the database effect

Thompson

Cook

2014

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

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(national, regional, school, classroom) forces that operate through the 'system'. While these forces change, they work through a discursivity that produces disciplinary affects, but in a different way. This new-old disciplinarity, or 'database effect', is here represented through a topological approach because of its utility for conceiving education in an increasingly networked world.The increasing utility of topological approaches to understanding social phenomena was clearly demonstrated in a recent double-issue of Theory, Culture & Society. For its editors, attempts to understand the emerging social must engage with topology as "surfaces that are spaces in themselves are not only self-organizing and emergent, but their self-organization brings being and knowing, ontology and epistemology, into new kinds of relations" (Lury, Parisi, & Terranova, 2012, p. 20). Using a mathematical construct to conceptualize social spaces, which might otherwise be understood discursively, may appear unusual. The metaphysics of mathematics, however, has long engaged with the social, for example in Leibniz's concept of incompossibility (Deleuze, 2006), Hacking's (1990) theorisation of statistics, governance and normalcy and Badiou's (2005) argument that mathematics is ontological and has always been significant for understanding multiplicity, continuity and the changes of forms and figures.While this mathematical turn is important, particularly in the age of big data and the consequent impact of datafication on social ontologies and professional/personal subjectivities, the use of topology as a heuristic for articulating the becoming-self in education surfaces has only recently been used in wider education analysis (Lingard & Sellar, 2013;de Freitas, 2014). Using topology to understand cultures and societies is not new, since Euler's solution to the problem of the 7 Bridges of Konigsberg, theorists have been intrigued by the potential of topology to tell us something about the ways that environments, people and customs/cultures connect in productive ways. For example, Lacan was absorbed by the potential for topological figures to "theorise the relationship of scientific 1 We are very grateful to Sam Sellar and Andrew Murphie for their helpful feedback and suggestions on early drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments.

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The impact of high-stakes testing on curriculum and pedagogy: a teacher perspective from Australia

Cited by 159 publications

References 10 publications

Curriculum policy reform in an era of technical accountability: ‘fixing’ curriculum, teachers and students in English schools

Curriculum policy reform in an era of technical accountability: ‘fixing’ curriculum, teachers and students in English schools

The Exclusion of the Creative Arts from Contracted School Curricula for Teaching the Common Core Standards

Becoming-topologies of education: deformations, networks and the database effect

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