Rural Teachers' Perceptions of How High-Stakes Testing Impacts High School Students
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- February 26, 2019
- Creator
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Steuart, Elizabeth L.
- Affiliation: School of Education
- Abstract
- As the culture of high-stakes testing increasingly takes on a greater presence in the modern school system, there is simultaneously a mounting debate on whether its presence is advancing or hindering the learning of today’s students. Additionally, there has been a greater focus on trying to understand the effects of high-stakes testing in urban or highly diverse school systems rather than their rural counterparts. Meanwhile, 20% of the United State’s public school students are enrolled in rural school districts (Strange, Johnson, Showalter, & Klein, 2012). This means that a large percentage of American schools are being left out of the high-stakes testing debate, and therefore studies that focus on the particular circumstance of rural schools are becoming increasingly imperative. The root of my desire to study the effects of high-stakes testing in rural settings originated from spending a significant portion of one summer in Highland, Kansas. The small town’s claim to fame is its community college, which draws most of its students from northeastern Kansas’s high schools through its athletic programs. My experiences with the young adults who grew up in and around this town inspired me to wonder how high-stakes testing fits into this type of small town culture. Many of the people I met were college-aged but had never had any interest or intention of attending college, not even the community college that was within walking distance of their homes. Instead, their various professional aspirations included becoming a welder, driving for a local truck company, working for the local branch of the Kansas Department of Transportation, and serving as a local sales representative for a national company that sells hunting gear specially made for women. If these were the fulfilling aspirations of these young, small town community members, what did high-stakes testing ever mean to them? Did a culture of high-stakes testing benefit their educational career? Did it prepare them for their future careers and lifestyles, which are essential to the productivity and safety of their local community? Was high-stakes testing the optimum format of evaluating the achievement of these students and the local high school? Standardized testing is a test format in which all participants are required to answer the same questions, or a selection from the same set of questions, in exactly the same way. It is scored in a consistent way so that results can be used to compare the relative performance among individual students and among groups of students (“Standardized Test,” 2013). High-stakes testing is a form of standardized testing in which the results are used to make critical decisions concerning students, teachers, schools, and school districts. These tests are often implemented to ensure the accountability of schools and educators, and to determine punishments, accolades, advancement, and compensation regarding the students, teachers, schools, and school districts involved (“Standardized Test,” 2013). Standardized testing and high-stakes testing in particular are used in a variety of educational settings, but in this study I will be focusing on their presence, implementation, and effects in rural education settings.
- Date of publication
- spring 2015
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Note
- Funding: None
- Advisor
- Derry, Sharon
- Degree
- Bachelor of Arts
- Honors level
- Honors
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Extent
- 60
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