CURRICULUM TEACHING VERSUS TEACHING -TO-THE-TEST: TOWARDS AN APPROPRIATE CLASSROOM INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICE IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Nigerian teachers and students, similar to the Americans, are overburdened in this era of high
stake and stressing standardized testing. They are under pressure to generate high test scores
to the centralized power structure. Teachers are to be accountable to their students through test
scores and they feel more and more threatened and terrified by the standardization of testing and
teaching. To this end, some teachers have adopted teaching-to-the-test teaching strategies to
compensate for this assessment practice (i.e. high-stake testing), while others teach to the
curriculum. We, therefore, through our review shade more light on the concepts “teaching-to-thetest
and curriculum teaching” and highlighted factors that promote inappropriate teaching in
Nigeria. The researchers noticed that teaching-to-the-test instructional practices are not
appropriate for our classrooms and quickly push forward the frontier knowledge of curricular
teaching as appropriate classroom instructional practices that could promote in-debt learning of
students. The researchers recommend that teaching according to the curriculum should be
embraced among Nigerian teachers in schools. As well, education stakeholders should help in
reducing the influence of factors that encourage inappropriate teaching practices such as
“teaching-to-the-test” in a bit to promote Curriculum teaching.

Keywords: Curriculum Teaching, Teaching-to-the-test, Classroom Instructional
Practices