Teacher Autonomy: A Multifaceted Approach for the New Millennium ...

McMillan and Nash (2000) went on to say that “Teachers desire autonomy and need to adapt instruction and assessment to their personal styles and to the needs of individual students. Teachers did not endorse standardization of practices that minimized these dimensions of being a teacher” (p. 34). Specifically, teachers felt that assessment associated with external accountability often differed from their own personal beliefs and the classroom reality that they encountered. The difference laid in the fact that the external factors did not originate from the child’s behavior or circumstances. However, external factors still affected the way teachers assessed students.

McMillan and Nash (2000) stated that mandated testing did have an effect on the way teachers assess but “not a radical or far-reaching influence” (p. 16). The data from their study indicated that according to teachers, there were several negative effects of mandated testing on education and assessment practices. First, many teachers felt that this type of testing was not in the best interest of students, and they felt that nontested content was likely to be de-emphasized, resulting in a narrowing of the curriculum. Teachers, therefore, were not satisfied with what mandated testing results told them about student knowledge, and they found that the more the mandated tests were emphasized in the classroom, the more they affected assessment practices.

Teachers’ autonomous rationales for choosing certain assessments were often contradictory to those required by mandated testing. For example, autonomous teachers often determined the assessment based on the learning objective. Whereas multiple choice may be suitable for low-level memory objectives, open-ended or performance assessments were preferred for high-level thinking objectives.