Standardized testing and effective instruction : Teacher perceptions on how high stakes testing affects instructional practive

High stakes, standardized testing has become the primary means of measuring student achievement, teacher quality, and school accountability. Significant classroom time, and instructional effort, is allocated to ready students for these high stakes tests. It is primarily teachers who bear the serious, weighted responsibility of preparing students for these tests. This paper seeks to understand, and identify, whether, and to what degree, the pressures of high stakes, standardized testing have impacted the manner in which teachers’ approach, and apply, classroom instruction. Centering individual teachers’ experiences, the study is informed, and contextualized, by the following foundational question; what are teachers’ perceptions of how standardized testing has affected their preferred instructional practices