Testing times: The affective impact of tests in Bangladeshi schools

Inadequate attention has been given to the nature and effects of testing on schooling in Bangladesh in research literature to date. In particular, there has been insufficient regard for the emotional or ‘affective’ impact of testing practices on students, educators and parents. We illustrate how the provision of a quality education presents as a particular challenge in a developing country such as Bangladesh, and how specific markers of achievement – notably test results, and particularly those associated with students’ attainment at the end of secondary schooling (Secondary School Certificate) – dictate so much of the lives of all stakeholders. Drawing upon literature and theorising associated with critical data studies, particularly in relation to the affective effects of testing, and interviews with senior Ministry of Education officials, headteachers, subject-teacher specialists, classroom teachers, students and parents in regional and metropolitan school settings in Bangladesh, schooling is revealed as a deeply affective enterprise in which over emphasis upon testing exacerbates and hides the failure of the decision-makers in education to pursue necessary policies and priorities. This includes adequate public investments, the provision of sufficient motivated and skilled teachers, and effective teaching-learning in the classroom – the lack of which create the conditions for private coaching and memorization-based testing. The research reveals a schooling system and broader culture which endorses, or at least accepts, private tutoring which has built up around high-stakes testing, but also how such tutoring is only available to those students and families able to afford such services. The result is a schooling system which is complicit in cultivating a broader culture in which testing and tutoring distract from the needs of education provision more broadly in Bangladesh society, leading to discriminatory and disenfranchising practices, even as the limitations of test-centred practices are critiqued, and efforts are made by educators to reduce reliance upon external tutoring as a necessary complement to schooling.