Teachers' responses to test‐driven accountability pressures: “If I change, will my scores drop?”

Abstract

This study describes how seven third grade teachers modified their skills‐based reading and language arts programs because they believed students were unable to apply skills to authentic learning situations. Teachers modified their instruction by increasing the number of opportunities students had to write extended prose while studying together for extended periods of time. To evaluate the program, we examined how the teachers' instructional changes corresponded to changes in students' reading and language arts standardized achievement test scores, special education referrals, and retentions. Across the project's two‐years, teachers decreased the total number of reading and language arts assignments by 62% as they increased the percentage of their multiple day (16.3%) and collaborative (10.4%) paragraph‐level writing assignments. The language arts scores in four of the seven classrooms increased over the project's duration (when compared with the teachers' scores for the three years prior to the intervention), and fewer students (decrease of 81%) were retained or referred for special education services (decrease of 47%). Students experienced few difficulties with the instructional changes while the teachers' major difficulty was with the grading of writing assignments. Teachers' concerns that students' standardized achievement test scores would drop as a result of their instructional changes persisted despite evidence to the contrary. The discussion focuses on how the teachers' concerns were reinforced by the school district's distribution and interpretation of standardized achievement test results.