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Post-COVID High-Stakes Exams in Comparative Perspective: Youth Experiences in Marginalized Secondary Schools in Colombia, India, and Malawi

Tue, March 25, 4:30 to 5:45pm, Palmer House, Floor: 7th Floor, Dearborn 2

Group Submission Type: Paper Session

Proposal

This panel explores the confluence of the COVID pandemic and high-stakes secondary exams in Colombia, India, and Malawi, and their impact on rural and urban youth’s secondary school experiences and current and future wellbeing. The panel’s focus on the consequences of conducting high-stakes exams during and after the pandemic sheds light on the broader question of how high-stakes exam systems–often designed to equalize opportunity–influence educational and educated life futures in a world in which youth must increasingly navigate a wide range of insecurities (flood, drought, disease, war, forced migration, etc.) caused by the climate crisis and human responses to it.

The papers draw on two years of youth-centered, extended ethnographic and longitudinal survey research conducted in Colombia, India, and Malawi with 9-10 or 10-11 graders in public schools located in economically, socially, and/or geographically marginalized communities. This research began just months before the pandemic and continued into 2023. It aimed to understand how youth attending public schools in marginalized communities in the three countries conceptualized the relevance of secondary schooling in their daily lives, in their current and future wellbeing, and in their livelihood opportunities and dreams. In so doing, it aimed to bring international development education discourses about “21st Century Skills” (such as digital literacy) and employment-focused educational outcomes into conversation with the experiences, needs, and dreams of secondary school relevance held by youth attending public schools in marginalized communities.

In each of the three countries, students in secondary school face one or more high-stakes exams that determine their access to continued public education and, often, their access to particular labor opportunities or career tracks. In all three countries, the exams themselves, as well as students’ learning opportunities, were highly destabilized during the pandemic. In all three countries, governments made short- and long-term changes to school calendars, school policies, school safety practices, and exam regimes in response to the pandemic. But, in all three countries, by the end of the pandemic, the exam regime was back in place or even strengthened, even as youth faced weakened extended family support systems and declining post-secondary educational opportunities and job prospects.

This panel presents a cross-national, mixed methods analysis of how youth, their families, their teachers, and their policymakers made sense of the purposes and relevance of schooling and of high-stakes exams before, during, and after the pandemic. It explores, within each country and across them, how the exam regimes interacted with the economic, social, and infrastructural marginalization of schools and communities to shape school policies and practices and student experiences and outcomes.

Across the papers, we first describe each of the educational systems and schools in which the research was conducted, focusing on similarities and differences in how secondary education is structured and resourced. We then explore if, when, and how exam regimes shifted during and directly after the pandemic; how these policy shifts (and the exam-centered focus of the systems) shaped educational quality, equity, or relevance; how teachers, students, and parents understood the purposes and consequences of exam regimes on students’ learning, schooldays, and post-secondary opportunities; and the kinds of differentiated outcomes (by gender, geography, social status, family wealth, etc.) that exam-centered teaching and exam-based sorting created during and right after the pandemic. We explore in detail the particular kinds of hopes and fears that exam-free years brought to one generation of students and teachers in each country, the “doubling down” on exam-taking that soon took its place in each country, and the consequences for the youth with whom we worked of taking a high-stakes exam directly after a year of very few learning opportunities.

Youth experiences are explored collectively and individually, through the experiences of a group of youth in each focal school with whom we worked very closely over multiple years. We trace the particular and collective experiences of these students before, during, and after taking an exam for which they received little instructional support, and whose outcomes may feel more or less determinate of their near- and long-term opportunities. Students’ exam-taking experiences are deeply shaped by their daily living conditions, families, peers, and teachers; and we explore how their relationships with each of these change over the course of the research. We also explore the particular role that teachers play in shaping the exam regimes in daily school practices: from their content and pedagogical choices, to the organization of teacher time, to teachers’ own sense-making concerning the reintroduction of high-stakes exams. Each panel presentation touches on these shared themes, allowing for in-depth analyses of processes and practices in each focal school, as well as cross-site analyses that explore important differences and similarities in the confluence of exams and pandemic in each site.

In examining these questions comparatively, we aim to open up a broader conversation about the multifaceted consequences of high-stakes exams in secondary education systems around the world, centered in the experiences of youth attending public schools in marginalized communities, and focused on youth wellbeing in the present and the future.

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