Problematizing the Non-Transformative Practices of Different Stakeholders in Response to High-Stakes Testing Impacts in Iran

Problematizing the Non-Transformative Practices of Different Stakeholders in Response to High-Stakes Testing Impacts in Iran

The use of the Nation-wide University Entrance Test (NUET) as a lever to improve education to promote curricular innovation or to change teaching and learning has been a common practice in Iran. However, it can be problematized that the NUET is associated with modularized programs in which trading for grades rather than the creation of learners who are empowered in more intrinsic ways shapes the students’ overall learning goals and the orientations. This has become such a taken-for granted situation that the stakeholders rarely, if ever, question its desirability in any profound way, seek to explore its consequences for or impacts on the student and more generally society, or try to do something about it. The aim of this critical study is to explore whether different stakeholders’ (EFL teachers and preuniversity students) actions and practices transform or perpetuate the detrimental washback of the NUET in Iran in and out of L2 classrooms. For this purpose, the data were collected through developed questionnaires, classroom observation checklist, and semistructured interviews from 60 EFL teachers and a cohort of 319 preuniversity students in Iran. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data attested that the EFL teachers’ and preuniversity students’ pedagogical actions and practices mostly reproduced the negative washback effects by focusing and capitalizing on the test content, practicing test-taking techniques, reviewing the previous NUET items and using them in final/midterm test, and adopting teaching and learning styles that simply transmit the decontextualized linguistic knowledge to the students. Finally, the findings of this study suggest a re-evaluation of teaching, learning, and testing actions and practices based on whether they reproduce or transform the deleterious impacts of the high-stakes testing industry on the stakeholders within and beyond the classroom contexts. This view of education and assessment is argued to empower EFL teachers and students to play a more active and transformative role in a more learning-centered educational milieu.