ABSTRACT
American, British and Australian school educational history illustrates a periodic obsession with standardised testing of school students dating back to the World War I. Risk-society inspired national standardised testing policies have even reached into readiness assessments for Kindergarten and Year 1 students. By 2015, some commentators were warning standardised testing was claiming "plague proportions" in American schools, "requiring too many tests of dubious value, according to the first comprehensive survey of the nation's largest districts". Reid sought to examine "the efficacy of some of the research connected to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests specifically that relating to classroom discipline, and examine the way the media handled the information that was released". With nationwide high-stakes standardised testing a mere 3 years old in Australia, the left-wing Whitlam Institute published a literature review of the international research on the topic from multiple perspectives. One perspective was that of teacher and pedagogy.
