Where does washback collide?

In language testing and applied linguistics, washback (also called backwash) is the influence a test exerts backwards onto the teaching and learning that prepare for it, so that what gets examined comes to drive what gets taught and how students study. Alderson and Wall's 1993 Does washback exist? questioned the then-casual assumption that high-stakes tests automatically improve or harm instruction, arguing that the effect is real but conditional and must be demonstrated rather than presumed. The referent is the directional pressure a test places on the classroom before it is sat, assessed through curriculum and classroom studies, and it has nothing to do with water sliding back down a beach or inflammation tracking up the bowel.[1]

Unit

The degree and direction a test alters prior teaching and learning

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through classroom observation, teacher and learner surveys, and comparisons of instruction under different testing regimes

In coastal geomorphology, backwash is the seaward return flow of water down the beach face after a wave's uprush (the swash) has spent its energy, and the balance between swash and backwash governs whether sediment is carried up the beach or dragged back out. Masselink and Puleo's 2006 review of swash-zone morphodynamics treats the thin, fast, unsteady sheet of water in this zone as the engine of beach change. The referent is a gravity-driven return flow and its sediment transport, measured by flow velocity, depth, and net beach profile change, and it is an entirely different thing from a test's effect on teaching or a disease of the gut, joined only by the image of something running back.[2]

Unit

The velocity and sediment load of water returning down the beach face

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Quantified by in-situ swash-zone flow and depth measurements and surveyed changes in the beach sediment budget

In clinical gastroenterology, backwash ileitis is mild inflammation of the terminal ileum found in some patients with extensive ulcerative colitis, named for the old idea that colonic contents wash back through an incompetent ileocecal valve into the small bowel. Haskell and colleagues' 2005 Pathologic features and clinical significance of backwash ileitis in ulcerative colitis characterised the lesion and tested whether it carries the prognostic weight once attributed to it. The referent is a pattern of distal small-bowel inflammation defined histologically, assessed at endoscopy and biopsy, and it is unrelated to a test's effect on teaching or the return flow on a beach, sharing only the metaphor of washing back.[3]

Unit

Presence and extent of ileal inflammation adjacent to colitis

Recovery means

Resolves with control of the underlying colitis; it marks extent of disease rather than a separate course

Measured by

Identified by endoscopic appearance and histological examination of terminal-ileum biopsies in colitis patients