Changing mathematics teachers’ conceptions of assessment and feedback

Abstract

Informed by an amalgam of notions drawn from constructivist, socio‐cultural, metacognitive and self‐regulation theory, the discourse created to describe assessment to enhance learning has gone through a number of iterations or discursive shifts. As a result, the current discourse is both ambitious and complex with the roles and responsibilities assigned to teachers and learners in learning and assessment radically transformed. Sponsored by the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) seeks to develop teachers’ research capability and to build knowledge about teaching and learning with the intention of improving outcomes for learners. Using a range of qualitative data generation strategies this TLRI research project investigated secondary school teachers’ and students’ conceptions of assessment and feedback. This paper reports on the professional learning that accrued for these teachers using the data gained from the four mathematics teachers in the project. It also details changes in these teachers’ thinking about the roles and responsibilities of teachers and learners in the assessment process and documents reported changes to their professional practice resulting from these changed views. Whilst it is argued that involvement in the project became a valuable form of professional learning whereby these teachers, to varying degrees, achieved accessibility to, and greater understanding of, the current discourse of formative assessment, the mediating influence of teachers’ efficacy beliefs is also acknowledged.

Keywords:

• formative assessment
• professional learning
• discourse
• mathematics
• practitioner research

Notes

1. asTTle (Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning) is an educational resource, available to all schools in New Zealand, for assessing literacy and numeracy in Years 4–12. Developed for the Ministry of Education by a team from the University of Auckland led by Professor John Hattie, asTTle provides a comprehensive range of data including: students’ levels of achievement in relation to curriculum outcomes; information about students’ individual learning needs; and national norms of performance.

2. A diamond ranking tool involves ranking items from ‘most important’ (1 item), ‘reasonably important’ (2 items), ‘moderately important’ (3 items), ‘not very important’ (2 items) to ‘least important’ (1 item).