Automatic Formative Assessment Strategies for the Adaptive Teaching of Mathematics

Abstract

Adaptive teaching is defined as applying different teaching strategies to different groups of students so that the natural diversity prevalent in the classroom does not prevent each student from achieving success. Some of the strategies for adaptive teaching are formative assessment, feedback, and self-regulated learning. For the application of these strategies, technology plays a fundamental role. Our research group has developed and tested a model for automatic formative assessment and interactive feedback for STEM using an Automatic Assessment System to allow adaptive teaching. This article presents the design, the implementation, and the analysis of adaptive teaching activities carried out by secondary school teachers of STEM disciplines during a training course. Teachers designed the transformation of questions created for standardized assessment into formative assessment questions, reflecting on how to adapt the requests to students’ different needs and how to create guided learning paths. In this paper, all the steps of the training activity carried out will be analyzed using some representative examples: the design of the questions with an analysis of the adaptive teaching strategies adopted; the reflections of the teachers at the end of the course; carrying out activities with students and analyzing their responses; the reflections of the teachers at the end of the activity.