The impact of school test format on adolescents’ well-being: Grammar-based and Freedom-of-Task test types influence on high school students

Abstract

The way knowledge is tested in high schools is a prominent preoccupation of teachers, but it is also an area of interest in terms of how it affects students’ well-being. With the United States of America setting the example and Italy tending toward the same system of assessing students using standardized tests, some educators have raised concern regarding how effective such tests are and the kind of impact they have on student’s emotion regulation, in particular on levels of stress, well-being and self-efficacy adolescents perceive before and after being assessed. As some students deploy divergent thinking in their cognitive process, standardized tests, which call for convergent thinking of studied notions, may not be appropriate for those learners who do not naturally converge knowledge, consequently eliciting poor marks and negative affect. This study investigated whether assessments in standardized test format in English as a second language contribute to lower levels of well-being, higher levels of stress and lower levels of self-efficacy in adolescents. It also examined two sets of test results: the standardized test ones and the alternative test ones where students were free to choose the task from a menu of options to appreciate whether the latter produced higher marks. Fifty-seven students attending an Italian, private, Catholic high school participated in this research taking two English grammar tests, a standardized one and an alternative one, and filled in psychological surveys regarding their well-being and attitudes toward creative cognition. Results did not support the hypothesis of a negative impact of standardized tests on both academic achievement and levels of affect nor support the hypothesis that more creative students would perform better in the alternative assessment. Further investigation, perhaps refining the study design and recruiting a bigger sample in a state funded school, may either confirm these results or produce data that would support the initial hypotheses of this study.