“It’s boring to teaching to the test”: High-stakes testing and a beginning Chinese language teacher’s agency

• In Event: Ensuring Equitable and Quality Education and Assessment (I)

Proposal

Introduction
Over the past few decades, high-stakes testing has become a significant part of neoliberal educational reforms worldwide (Au, 2007; Bartell et al., 2019; Smith, 2016). Many countries, such as USA, England, Singapore, and Canada, have used the results of standardized tests to evaluate students, teachers, and schools, influencing various aspects such as grade promotion and graduation, salaries, tenure decisions, and school rankings (Au, 2007).
Research has shown how high-stakes testing has constrained teachers’ teaching, reshaping teachers’ professional identity (Ball, 2003), devaluing the caring and relational aspects of teaching (Mausethagen, 2013), narrowing curriculum (Berliner, 2011), and promoting teacher-centered pedagogies (Au, 2007). However, some studies have highlighted teachers’ agency in negotiation with high-stakes testing. Teachers’ personal belief, their preexisting identities, and supportive collegial relationships are important sources of their agency (Bartell et al., 2019; Buchanan, 2015). Yet, more research is still needed to explore how beginning teachers, who start their teaching career with many uncertainties and problems, navigate and respond to high-stakes testing.
This study demonstrated how Alice, a beginning Chinese language teacher, complied with as well as resisted China’s high-stakes testing. Alice’s story helps to illuminate how beginning teachers are likely to experience with high-stakes testing and find a way to negotiate such structure. It echoes the 2024 CIES meeting theme “the power of protest” by illuminating a form of protest marked as strategic compliance with resistance. The study provides insights into ways we can support and develop beginning teachers’ knowledge, skills, agency, and resilience in an era of high-stakes testing.
Theoretical Framework
This study adopted ecological teacher agency theory (Priestley et al., 2015) to explain the factors that contribute to and constrain a beginning teacher’s agency in responding to high-stakes testing. This theory perceives teacher agency as teachers’ capacity to act in their work, explaining that the achievement of teacher agency is informed by past experience, oriented toward the future, and enacted in a concrete situation. Teacher agency is both constrained and supported by discursive, material and relational resources available to teachers (Priestley et al., 2015). While ecological agency theory has been widely used in studying teacher agency, there is little research applying this theory to explore the interactions between beginning teachers and high-stakes testing.
Method
To understand the complexity of beginning teachers’ response to high-stakes testing, this study employed an in-depth case study, focusing on Alice, a beginning Chinese language teacher with three years of experience. She once taught in an elite middle school and was praised by colleagues, parents, and students as an innovative and excellent language teacher. The first author conducted five in-depth semi-structure interviews with Alice, each lasting approximately one and a half hours, to explore her personal history, teaching experience, and response to official curriculum and high-stakes testing. Additionally, the study collected Alice’s reflective journals, teaching materials, and feedback from parents and students. By adopting inductive data analysis, the study identified four themes related to Alice’s experience with high-stakes testing and examined the factors that contribute to or constrain her agency.
Findings
The findings showed how Alice experienced high-stakes testing, made efforts to understand its logic, and simultaneously critiqued it. By demonstrating her daily teaching, the study also illuminated Alice’s agency in her language teaching despite the influence of high-stakes testing.
As a new teacher, Alice encountered the requirements and pressures of high-stakes testing through interactions with colleagues, weekly faculty meetings, sharing teaching materials, and regular bi-weekly language tests. She felt shocked and embarrassed by her difficulties in answering test questions and her students’ lack of preparedness. To be responsible for her students, she dedicated herself to relearning the logic of tests through practicing tests and watching online videos, integrating test skills into her teaching. Nevertheless, she strongly criticized the tediousness of test preparation.
In her daily language teaching, Alice made deliberate efforts to make the learning process more interesting and engaging. With the belief of teaching for literary comprehension and application, she incorporated additional reading materials, assigned interesting DIY homework, and encouraged students to freely express themselves in classroom discussions, even if their expressions contradicted test requirements. Her personal interest in literature and sociology, along with her ability to interpret texts, which was partly trained in her master’s program, informed her to have a critical understanding of textbooks. Additionally, she conducted self-directed learning of language teaching through online resources, which helped her learn alternative pedagogies. As a result, Alice was praised by students as the best language teacher they had encountered.
Discussions and Conclusion
The study demonstrated how high-stakes testing influenced Alice’s teaching practice and how Alice complied with and critiqued this structure while finding ways to negotiate it. Drawn upon an ecological agency theory, the study identified that the importance of the teacher’s personal literary understanding (a form of subject knowledge), past experience with tests, educational beliefs, and the pursuit of meaningful teaching in achieving agency. Additionally, the study emphasized the crucial role of networks, including colleagues, students, parents, and online learning communities, in supporting and constraining the teacher’s negotiation. Moreover, China’s current educational reform which addressed student-centered pedagogy, also offered resources for Alice’s agency. The findings highlight the importance of subject knowledge, networks, and educational reform in sustaining beginning teachers’ agency, aspects that have been overlooked in the previous study (Bartell et al., 2019; Loh & Hu, 2014; Priestley et al., 2015). Teacher educators should pay more attention on the power of humanity, a form of subject knowledge, in language teaching.

Authors

• Jia Jiang, College of Education,Zhejiang University

• Yiran Li