As a teacher educator, I often receive lesson plans from my teacher candidates as early as September that I can tell are influenced by standardized tests. These lessons have several patterns in common. These types of lessons introduce one decontextualized skill (like deciphering the meaning of a vocabulary word from context clues or determining a central idea). Then the teacher presents a short text to read (a poem or a chunk from a novel or a historical document). There is usually limited discussion about what we’re reading or why, because the text itself does not matter—it’s just a vehicle to practice a skill. How you feel or what you think about the text is not important.

After reading this short passage, the teacher asks students to apply the skill either by answering a multiple choice question or responding to a text-dependent comprehension question. Then the class discusses what answers were right or wrong. Similarly for writing tasks, I see teachers assigning the same type of essay over and over, such as literary analyses identifying central ideas or document-based question essays. Why we’re choosing certain structures (five-paragraph essay, “RADD” paragraphs, etc.) or who we are writing for often remains undiscussed.

This is what is known as “assessment washback,” which Anthony Green defines as “consequences (often unintended and damaging) on instruction prior to and in preparation for an assessment.” What is interesting to me is that sometimes teachers don’t even realize that their instruction is being shaped by standardized tests. Sometimes they just can’t imagine another way to teach! Field mentors may feel they have to give these kinds of lessons high scores on departmental rubrics because they are aligned with standards-based objectives (though I’ve had many call me up as a sanity check to ask why schools are pushing for this kind of skills-only instruction). 

What is the impact of pedagogies influenced by standardized testing? Let me walk you through a few common issues to watch out for:

1. Text selection: Your school or curriculum may focus on a narrow range of print-based texts or problems that are overrepresented on standardized tests, which may exclude multimodal, youth-targeted, or youth-created texts.

2. Multiple choice: Your school or curriculum may focus on multiple choice as its primary formative assessments, which prioritizes decontextualized skills and provides limited information about student learning processes.

3. Writing Tasks: Your school or curriculum may only focus on standardized writing structures, which often limits learning about processes of writing or audience.

4. Academic Language: Your school or curriculum may only care about students learning to use academic English, which excludes other languages or cultural dialects that are perfectly legitimate for learning.

Even if your students have to take a standardized test at the end of the year, this doesn’t have to wash back into your instruction all year long! Consider these suggestions about ways you can shift your pedagogy toward more holistic kinds of teaching instead: 

1. Text selection: Think about ways to put several texts in conversation, including texts that spark students’ interests, texts that youth choose themselves, or thematically paired texts that consider similar ideas using different genres or modalities.

2. Contextualized Learning: Plan to work toward expansive performance assessments that put students in conversation with different communities, whether that be local, disciplinary, or youth audiences. Formative assessments should collect data about students’ processes of learning, not just whether they get an answer right or wrong. 

3. Writing Tasks: Move beyond structurally-based ways of teaching writing to consider how ways of writing can change depending on the audience or used to generate ideas instead of just presenting them.

4. Hybrid Language: Use translanguaging techniques that allow students to bring in other languages or dialects to show what they know.

What expansive learning outcomes are possible when we move beyond concerns of standardized tests? Below I’ll share an example of ways a student engaged with a performance assessment my co-teachers and I designed for a public school classroom that resisted standardized testing pedagogies in favor of more expansive learning outcomes. 

I. Writing Tasks for Expansive Audiences

The class was hard at work on their Fandom Transformation projects, an assignment which tasked students with choosing a fandom and designing an artifact that addressed a critical problem in the fandom. An important part of the project was that instead of just using a standardized writing format like a literary analysis or an argumentative paper, students were allowed to choose what type of composition would be most authentic for their fandom. Students were offered many different genres and modalities of fandom artifacts they might choose to make, such as fanfictions, blogs, TedTalks, poetry, etc. Access the full project prompt here on p. 128. 

II. Contextualized Learning in Youth-Selected Contexts

Jewel, a Latinx senior in our class, was considering different options for her project. She initiated a writing conference to help her pick a direction. I started by prompting her to think about anything problematic she might have experienced in a fandom. “Problematic?” Jewel asked. I gave an example of something I considered problematic from the most recent Star Wars movie at the time, which was how much fans wanted the character Rey to date Kylo Ren. I explained that if I were writing a blog post for the fandom, I would unpack why that relationship was toxic, citing reasons like him kidnapping and torturing her. 

Jewel was a huge fan of the TV show Lucifer, a modern reimagining of Biblical characters. I asked her if the show might have any critical issues like gender or racial stereotypes: “Are they killing off characters of color or marginalizing them?” Jewel considered this. At first, she explained, she felt like there weren’t enough characters of color on the show, but as the show continued, she felt that it got more and more diverse. Jewel and I decided we needed to do some digging around in the fandom to see if we could find any critical issues frequently discussed in the fandom. The pair of us started to explore different blogs, articles, and even memes related to the Lucifer fandom.

III. Supporting Original Claims in Meaningful Conversations

While we searched the fandom, Jewel told us about how excited she was for the next season to come out, with her friend adding, “Lucifer is dead fire.” Jewel considered how Lucifer’s mother did not want him mixing with humanity, and we discussed whether that could be considered classism. I asked Jewel about the way the show deals with morality and if she ever disagreed with the show’s decision-making about that: “The way that [the writers] say this is right or this is wrong, or the decisions that he makes?”

Jewel thought through different reckless decisions that the main character Lucifer had made but didn’t feel like she disagreed with the writers. In response to an article calling the Lucifer fandom “the most polite fandom ever,” I asked Jewel whether the fans ought to be less polite and instead be more critical. This led to Jewel and her friend discussing the ethics of Lucifer’s mom sleeping with someone to gather information about her son, as well as ways other relationships in the show might be toxic, with Jewel commenting, “Oh my god, that shipping is bad.” At the end of the conference, Jewel made a plan to do a close reading of the show and discuss problems with these relationships, a topic she felt was important for the fandom to consider.  

Through this formative assessment, we see that Jewel has to make many choices for herself even just to get started. Instead of a teacher providing an excerpt to analyze and a skill to apply, she has to choose a text and a critical lens for herself, considering what different lenses would be interesting for this particular audience. Jewel is the expert in the situation as she evaluates the show through several different critical lenses and dismisses ideas that she doesn’t think will work. She takes up youth dialects including concepts of “shipping” and puts it in conversation with disciplinary language about characterization and critical language about representation and race. 

Being able to connect her in-school learning with her out-of-school interests was one of the most compelling things she felt she learned from the project, as she shared in an end-of-class interview:

But in the class I felt like it changed on how I view things, like different fandoms. Basically—how do I word this?—just don't watch it to watch, and pay attention. How deep it goes and stuff like that...I felt like it changed in the sense where I see things more deeper…Like when I was researching Lucifer, it was many different opinions and like little blogs about it and like I saw, I don't know…Just the way it's viewed. And what other people say about it and actually focus on what they're saying and then actually watch that show and see. 

Here we see how this assignment helped her not only to apply critical lenses to popular TV shows, but that she learned to think about ways that texts are situated in larger critical conversations. You can see how this kind of project-based learning both encompasses and goes beyond skills required on standardized tests.

When you know what standardized assessment washback is, you can see ways that it creeps into our everyday pedagogies and narrows what kind of learning we aim to support. Instead of giving into teaching decontextualized skills, let’s challenge ourselves to create expansive performance assessments that enable students to engage with a variety of multimodal texts that are meaningful to them, make informed decisions about familiar audiences, and bring in their own knowledge and languages. 

Interested in hearing more? Download our full study about Jewel’s learning here!

Karis Jones, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English Language Arts Education at Empire State University - SUNY. As a teacher educator, literacy consultant, public humanities scholar, and community activist, she studies issues of equitable literacies learning across disciplinary, fandom, and gaming spaces. Stay tuned for her forthcoming book with Dr. Scott Storm, Fandoms in the Classroom: A Social Justice Approach to Transforming Literacy Learning, coming soon from Myers Education Press!