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Teachers' Perceptions of the Impact of State-Mandated Standardized Testing: The Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) as a Case Study of Consequences

Abstract In the last decade, the debate over state-mandated standardized testing has become one of the most heated, political debates in education. Situated within that debate and drawing from it, this paper examines the relationship among teachers, teaching, and standardized testing, using the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) as a case study of consequences. Based on a six-month study comprising interviews with five secondary social studies teachers in Michigan, this paper explores how standardized testing and the discourses surrounding it help construct teachers' educational imagination by defining the boundaries of the actual and the possible in social education. With the idea that the meaning of standardized testing and its implications for teachers are not pre-determined but, rather, are constructed through teachers' perceptions—thoughts, feelings, beliefs—of them as they interact with the test and its discourses, the study first identifies and explores the various discourses surrounding the MEAP as well as the MEAP as a discursive practice in and of itself and, second, how teachers' perceptions of the test are constructed through those discourses, how those perceptions guide teachers' responses to the test and its requirements, and what possibilities such responses open and close for them as educators, for the field of social studies education, and for their students as learners and citizens.