Abstract

The chapter presents findings related to Czech teachers’ and pupils’ difficulties with, opinions on, and needs associated with formative assessment, namely, peer assessment, in inquiry-based lessons. The research was conducted within the EU-funded Assess Inquiry in Science, Technology, and Mathematics Education project (ASSIST-ME). Six teachers of primary mathematics worked with researchers on inquiry tasks and methods of peer assessment and implemented them in their classrooms. The paper focuses mainly on (a) the interplay of teachers’ intentions, subject matter, and learners in inquiry; (b) the teachers’ role in supporting learning via (formative) assessment; and (c) the pupils’ role in their own learning and the learning of peers. Significant phenomena in implementation of assessment were identified, namely, the importance of formulation of learning objectives; pupils’ ability to decide about the correctness, identify the mistakes, and give supporting feedback to their peers; possible (and needed) support; and institutionalization of knowledge.

Highlights

  • The issue of assessment has a long tradition at ICME, e.g., Topic Study Group “Assessment and Testing in Mathematics Education” (Suurtamm and Neubrand 2015) at ICME 12 focused on:

  • When teaching mathematics at the primary school level in the Czech Republic, teachers often use materials to support their teaching that define only the topic of the lesson and cover classroom management

  • The quality of feedback that pupils may gain from their solutions depends on the accuracy of the definition and the operationalization of the learning objective of the “inquiry.” At the beginning of our sequence of lessons, the objectives defined in cooperation with the teachers were quite general (e.g., “get experience,” “apply a known procedure in a new environment”)

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Summary

Introduction

School assessment as a feedback tool and an important part of interaction among key actors in school education has for a long time been the subject of discussion in the Czech Republic because it influences the character of the entire system of teaching and learning. School assessment is closely related to school tradition and the culture of education. For this reason, the implementation of inquiry based approaches in mathematics education at school includes, among other problems, the challenges of having to comply with curriculum requirements, classroom. The issue of assessment has a long tradition at ICME, e.g., Topic Study Group “Assessment and Testing in Mathematics Education” (Suurtamm and Neubrand 2015) at ICME 12 focused on:. Our study focused on classroom-based assessment of pupils (in the sense of definition published in OECD 2013). This assessment requires specification of the purpose for which the data are collected and interpreted, i.e., the purpose of assessing. It may concern individual pupils, groups of pupils, or the whole population (for example, large-scale external tests and examinations)

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