Reimagining the washback ecosystem: new directions from Asia's high-stakes testing landscapes

Washback, impact, and consequencesWashback, the influence of assessment (testing) on teaching and learning, has been an educational phenomenon persistently studied from many different perspectives in the field of language assessment.While washback is now a well-known term, impact is also used in language assessment to refer to the influence of assessment and testing on various aspects of education and on stakeholders in a society (socio-educational impact).Consequences mean the results (mostly negative) of assessment and testing at the individual and societal level.These three terms all refer to the studies on the interrelationships among teaching, learning and testing at various levels in education.Since the seminal work of Alderson & Wall (1993) posed the question of -"does washback exist" more than 30 years ago, a large and continuous number of washback studies in language assessment have been conducted around the world (see Xie & Jia, 2025 in this special issue).The large collection of washback studies has repeatedly examined and tested Alderson & Wall's 15 hypotheses of the influence of assessment and testing on various aspects of teaching and learning.In my personal and professional opinion, only two hypotheses remain to be explored further.The rest of the hypotheses have been well-tested and reported on in the research literature.13 Tests that do not have important consequences will have no washback.This hypothesis has been rejected in a number of studies reviewed in Cheng, Sun, & Ma (2015).15 Tests will have washback effects for some learners and some teachers, but not for others.We continue to explore what types of learners (unique characteristics of learners) and teachers are affected more or less.Is there a pattern?And under what conditions?In Cheng, Sun, & Ma (2015, p. 436), we stated that "No area of language assessment research in the past 20 years has received a greater increase in attention than washback research" based on a systematic literature review of empirical studies between 1993 and 2013.In this special issue, Xie & Jia (2025) conducted a 30-year review on washback .These two reviews both illustrate the on-going and flourishing research on washback.The two reviews among many recent publications, e.