Rural Teachers' Perceptions of How High-Stakes Testing Impacts High School Students
Creators: name: Steuart, Elizabeth L.
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2015

description: 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.