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    Professional identity and high-stakes tests: What they tell us about schools, teachers, and students
    (2013-06-28) Barrow, Dorian
    The professional practice of teachers is shaped and directed by their sense of identity (Grootenboer and Ballantyne, 2010). All teachers have some conception of themselves as educators, but also have some identities that relate to the nature of the test accountability environment of the specific school context in which they teach. This paper reports on a qualitative multi-case study that explored the nexus of these identities with seven primary school teachers who prepare students to sit a high-stakes examination. The Common Entrance Examination (CEE) is defined as a high-stakes examination administered to some students in the last year of primary education, governing admission to various types of secondary schools (De Lisle, 2008). The preliminary findings presented here suggest that when teaching a high-stakes examination class, teachers often select their test preparation strategies in ways that unconsciously reflect their professional identities; identity meaning "being recognized as a certain type of person in a given context" (Gee, 2001, p. 99). Three such strategies are supplementary tutoring, drill and practice, and reflexive pedagogical praxis. Beliefs teachers have about the fairness and the benefits of the high-stakes test, for example, appear to be related in complex ways to the modes of positioning their classroom test preparation strategies. It also appears that excellence in schools' performance on the high-stakes test is associated with the level of alignment that the teacher has with the high-stakes test, with high levels of alignment being associated with high levels of reflexive praxis by the teacher and producing the best overall student test results. The study found that teacher identity-related-processes also provided insights into why some students' underperform on standardize tests, especially in mathematics, and as to why students' level of preparation on entering the sixth-grade is generally perceived to be inadequate