School testing culture and teacher satisfaction
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School testing culture and teacher satisfaction William C. Smith 1 & Jessica Holloway 2 Received: 3 February 2020 / Accepted: 28 October 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Teachers, as frontline providers of education, are increasingly targets of accountability reforms. Such reforms often narrowly define ‘teacher quality’ around performative terms. Past research suggests holding teachers to account for student performance measures (i.e. test scores) damages their job satisfaction, including increasing stress and burnout. This article examines whether the relationship between test-based accountability and teacher satisfaction can be, in part, explained by the emphasis of student test scores in teacher appraisals. Although historically used for formative purposes, recent research demonstrates that across a large range of countries, nearly all teachers work in a system where their appraisal is based, in part, on students’ test scores. Using data from the 2013 Teaching and Learning International Survey, we pool data from 33 countries to evaluate the direct and indirect effect of school testing culture on teacher satisfaction. Results suggest that there is a direct relationship between the intensity of the testing culture and the satisfaction of teachers, as well as an indirect relationship with test score emphasis in teacher appraisals suppressing potential positive effects of appraisals on teacher satisfaction. Keywords Teacher satisfaction . Accountability . Testing culture . Teacher appraisal .
TALIS Recent decades have brought about a sharp increase in teacher-focused accountability policies and practices. This global phenomenon (Holloway et al. 2017; Verger and Parcerisa 2017) has relied heavily on the numerical measures of ‘teacher quality’, as various forms of standardised achievement tests grow in prominence. Large-scale international achievement tests, such the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), as well as national (e.g. NAPLAN in Australia) and subnational tests (e.g. state* William C. Smith [email protected]
1
Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
2
Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Centre, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability
level tests in the USA), have helped facilitate the incorporation of student test scores into accountability systems around the world. While most of these standardised tests were never designed or intended to be used for measuring teacher quality or effectiveness, it is becoming increasingly common for schools to incorporate student test scores in their teacher-level appraisal/evaluation systems. Indeed, Smith and Kubacka (2017) analysed international data from the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) and found that nearly all teachers (i.e. 97%) reported that their appraisals included some form of student test scores. While multiple measures of teacher performance ar
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