The study did not investigate the question of whether or not TOEFL preparation courses were effective in raising scores on the test and, to this date, no previous research of this kind appears to have been conducted. Only the processes of teaching and learning were observed and examined in order to determine the extent of TOEFL washback in this setting. The authors concluded that the TOEFL did indeed affect both what and how teachers taught, but that the effect differed in degree and kind from teacher to teacher. More importantly, they suggested that it is not a test alone that causes washback, but the way that test is approached by administrators (who may determine the necessity of large class sizes), materials writers (who may fail to give proper guidance to teachers on possible ways to teach with a certain set of materials), and teachers themselves (who may devote little energy to finding alternative or innovative [-5-] ways to teach test preparation classes) which actually creates the phenomenon of washback for a given language proficiency test.