Supporting primary school teachers\u2019 classroom assessment in mathematics education: effects on student achievement

Michiel Veldhuis,Marja Van Den Heuvel-Panhuizen

doi:10.1007/s13394-019-00270-5

Abstract

In a three-phase study, with a total of 40 third-grade teachers and their 830 students, teachers were supported to use classroom assessment techniques (CATs) to reveal their students’ knowledge of number operations. In phase I, four teachers and 66 third-grade students participated in five monthly workshops in which CATs were co-designed and their use was discussed. In phase II, the first phase was replicated with four workshops with six different teachers and 148 third-grade students. In these two exploratory phases, we evaluated student achievement on a standardized national mathematics test in a pre-/posttest design and compared changes herein to changes in the national norm sample. In phase III, a control condition was added to the design to experimentally investigate the effect on student achievement with 30 teachers and 616 third-grade students. Teachers were randomly assigned to participate in 0, 1, 2, or 3 1-hour workshops. In all three phases, we found a significant increase in students’ mathematics achievement scores on the standardized mathematics test. In phase III, the increase was significantly larger in the classes of teachers participating in three workshops than in classes with less workshops. Additionally, results from the analysis of classroom observations, feedback forms, and interviews indicate that teachers could easily integrate the CATs into their practice and could gather valuable information on their students. The results from the different phases of this study combined indicate that supporting teachers in their development and use of classroom assessment in mathematics may contribute to the improvement of students’ mathematics achievement.

Highlights

There are many different ways of carrying out formative assessment, the type of formative assessment we focus on is the type that is completely in “the hands of teachers” (Van den Heuvel-Panhuizen and Becker 2003, p. 683) and is often called classroom assessment (e.g., Andrade and Brookhart 2019; Black and Wiliam 1998; Shepard 2000; Stiggins and Chappuis 2005)
A team of teachers and researchers performed mathe-didactical analyses of the mathematical content of that period of the school year were performed and, on the basis of these, classroom assessment techniques (CATs) were developed and designed that were inspired by insights from research in mathematics education and formative assessment
In the experimental third phase of our study, we found that students of teachers that participated in three 1-hour workshops on the development and use of CATs had significantly larger score gains than students from teachers that had participated in fewer workshops

Summary

Introduction

Classroom assessmentAssessment, with the purpose of making informed decisions about how instruction should be continued, is embedded in teachers’ teaching practice and is called formative assessment. Contrary to the past, when there were often concerns about the reliability of teachers’ judgements of students’ performances (Parkes 2013), the role of the teacher includes gaining insights into their students’ progress Such a roll is seen as crucial for adapting their teaching to students’ needs (Harlen 2007). Notwithstanding the importance of the use of such assessment activities, teachers do not often report using them in practice (e.g., Frey and Schmitt 2010; Veldhuis et al 2013) This might be due to such assessments having to be clearly linked to the taught, or to be taught, content for the realization of effective formative assessment (Hondrich et al 2016). Our study is designed to learn more about the feasibility and effectiveness of supporting primary school teachers in the development and use of domain- and topic-specific classroom assessment in mathematics

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion