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High Stakes Testing
and Fourth Grade Readers:
Documenting the Impact
on Teachers, Children, and Learning
Mellinee Lesley
Using participant observation (Spradley, 1980) and narrative inquiry (Lyons & LaBoskey, 2002) as a framework for research, the author examines the ways that high stakes reading tests in a Texas school shaped the interactions of a university literacy researcher with fourth grade students in a reading/social studies class during a semester’s time. The primary question threading through the collection of narrative vignettes presented here consists of how such accountability mandates interfere with other types of locally-derived professional development and reading initiatives. Taken collectively, these vignettes consider the resulting effects of mandated assessment that imparts severe consequences for children, is developmentally inappropriate (McGill-Franzen, 1998), is predicated upon an accountability system that few educators and parents are invited to question or thoroughly understand, and is culturally removed. These narrative vignettes also point to a lack of inquiry in assessment (Serafini, 2001) and reading reform initiatives which holds the potential for creating a kind of systemic helplessness where parents, children, teachers, administrators, and literacy researchers caught in the fray of high stakes reading assessment feel powerless to effect change.
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High Stakes Testing and Fourth Grade Readers