High Stakes Assessments

My Experience with High Stakes 
Assessment in International Schools

Introduction:
Having worked in schools overseas for my entire career I have never experienced the kinds of pressures that many teachers seem to face in the United States with respect to high-stakes assessment.   The idea of having my job security tied to the performance of my students on some government administered tests truly does baffle me.  While there are some clear pros and clear cons pointed out by Munoz (2014), it is obvious that there is a problem with the system of standardized testing as it leads teachers to suppress creativity and problem-solving and move in a direction of teaching to the test in an attempt to save their jobs.  

Being an IB World School, however, does bring with it a couple of examples of High-Stakes Assessments that impact the teacher and the students.  Perhaps not in the way that it does in the united states, but in equally detrimental ways.  My school offers all three programs of the IB:  The PYP, the MYP and the DP.  While the PYP has no high-stakes assessments at all, the other two certainly do, with the MYP recently adding high-states assessment in 2015.  I would like to discuss here the impact that this has had on student learning in my school.

Assessments in the DP:
For years the DP has been grounded in several high stakes assessments:

1. The DP Exam.  This occurs after 2 years of studying a subject and is worth around 80%-90% of the students DP results.
2. The IA.  This "internal assessment" is internally assessed and externally moderated.  While it varies across subjects it is a short term exploration into a topic with each of the 6 DP subjects that the student is interested in.  This makes up the remaining percentage of he students subject score.
3. The EE.  The Extended Essay is a large piece of research that every DP student must complete. While this is not reflected in the subject scores all students must pass this in addition to completing CAS (Community, Action, Service) and TOK (the Theory of Knowledge).

For our DP teachers and students the results are highly important and more and more universities are looking to these results to gauge university readiness.  Students are accepted and/or rejected based on these scores and that places a lot of pressure on students to perform on the day of the exam.  It places pressure on the teachers to ensure that all the content is covered and they they have given the students ample practice to complete old exams in order to prepare them for the real exam.   As you might conjecture, teaching to the test is very common.  

The eAssessments in the MYP:

In 2014 the MYP switched its assessment practices from an internally assessed - eternally moderated model to one where the students will have to complete five on-screen exams, two portfolios and the personal project along with service and action to get their MYP Certificate.  Granted, this does not mean too much in terms of university acceptances like in the DP, but in a culture where face is very important and certificates are highly valued, there is the added pressure on teachers and students in the MYP to do well.  Since the work has a more conceptual framework, teaching to the test like in the DP is not that common, but it has placed the need to use sample on-screen exams as a baseline to create their own assessment, which in some ways is taking away from the opportunities for creativity and inquiry within the MYP.

A South Australian Perspective:

I have recently finished leading a workshop on Inquiry at a school in Adelaide Australia.  I was surprised to see that even in Australia there were set standards and high-stakes tests that the students have to take.  What was more shocking was the impact that the tests had on teaching and learning.  There was a  burning desire of the teachers in the workshop to teach more inquiry and 21st century skills, but they felt bound to continue to ask the questions in the same way that the test does.  The feeling was amongst teachers was that if they wanted the kids to do well, then they had to teach to the skills necessary on the test and clearly there was not a deep level of inquiry or 21st century learning skills on the state exam.  Clearly this was impacting the teachers by limited how and what they could teach as well as the pressure on the students to do well and get into a good university.

Conclusion:
What I have learned in all of this are a few things:

1. There are pros and cons to high-stakes assessment that cannot be overlooked.  Far too often we only focus on the negative.
2. Regardless of the system or country you are in, there are high-stakes assessments, and they are impacting how we teach and the social emotional well-being of our students.

References:

Munoz, Roberta. (2014). High Stakes Testing Pros and Cons.  Retrieved [Jan. 29, 2016] from https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5rGfc4UZHoXQzYyX0I0MlktZWs&usp=sharing

The International Baccalaureate.  http://www.ibo.org

The South Australian Curriculum Standards & Accountability Framework.  http://www.sacsa.sa.edu.au/index_fsrc.asp?t=Home