Abstract:
Despite the changing landscape of assessment in many subject areas, built on strong empirical support for the use of effective assessment practices to support learning and teaching, assessment activities in many mathematics classrooms fail to reflect this change. Research highlights the importance of teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about the purpose of assessment and their role in influencing teachers’ assessment practices. A lack of understanding of the key principles of effective assessment negatively impacts teachers’ willingness to change their assessment practices to align with effective practices. Changing teachers’ assessment practices is critical to optimise students’ outcomes and to empower them to be contributors to professions and society in the long run.
We used a sequential mixed-method design, within an interpretative constructivist paradigm to explore mathematics teachers’ assessment literacy. The first stage involved a quantitative survey exploring teachers’ assessment beliefs and practices. The second stage involved teacher interviews to further explore the trends that emerged from Stage 1.
Initial findings show that there is a dominant belief that assessment is for measuring students’ learning with assessment is for improving learning and teaching activities being secondary. This is evident from the competing roles of summative and formative assessments, which most teachers perceive as a dichotomy. There is also a dominant view that assessments are teacher-centric activities rather than a shared responsibility with students and other stakeholders. In addition, mathematics teachers strongly believe that assessment results can be used for ranking students and for norm-referencing. The dominant practice is frequent assessment to prepare students for high-stakes assessments with less evidence of eliciting and giving feedback. These findings provide valuable insight for understanding how teachers’ beliefs and understandings can be re-aligned to the principles of effective assessment practices. We will discuss how these findings can inform the development of strategic professional learning to support teachers improve their use of assessment to support learning.
We used a sequential mixed-method design, within an interpretative constructivist paradigm to explore mathematics teachers’ assessment literacy. The first stage involved a quantitative survey exploring teachers’ assessment beliefs and practices. The second stage involved teacher interviews to further explore the trends that emerged from Stage 1.
Initial findings show that there is a dominant belief that assessment is for measuring students’ learning with assessment is for improving learning and teaching activities being secondary. This is evident from the competing roles of summative and formative assessments, which most teachers perceive as a dichotomy. There is also a dominant view that assessments are teacher-centric activities rather than a shared responsibility with students and other stakeholders. In addition, mathematics teachers strongly believe that assessment results can be used for ranking students and for norm-referencing. The dominant practice is frequent assessment to prepare students for high-stakes assessments with less evidence of eliciting and giving feedback. These findings provide valuable insight for understanding how teachers’ beliefs and understandings can be re-aligned to the principles of effective assessment practices. We will discuss how these findings can inform the development of strategic professional learning to support teachers improve their use of assessment to support learning.