Ensuring Sustainable Quality Education in Mathematics for All: The Role of Teachers' Assessment Knowledge

• In Event: Ensuring Equitable and Quality Education and Assessment (I)

Proposal

• Relevance to CIES 2024

The UNESCO-SDG-4 aims to ensure inclusive and equitable education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. However, some interpret this mandate to mean that all girls and boys must complete free primary and secondary schooling by 2030, leaving aside critical aspects essential to realizing such a goal (UNESCO, 2016). Teachers worldwide must be competent in using assessments to guide their practice and enable their students to self-assess their competence as they engage with the curriculum and the world around them. This requires extensive learning and practicing before becoming a teacher of record. Recent research supports the call for “assessment competent teachers” and “assessment competent learners” as key to increasing the quality of education (DeLuca & Johnson,2017; Frey,et al.,2018). This call requires urgent teacher education and teaching reform—the CIES community must support such reform.

• Theoretical Framework

This work is based on Cognitive Learning Theory, which aims to teach children to think about their thinking and actively participate in their learning. The teacher's role is to assess prior knowledge and help students take ownership of their learning (Chi,2021). Vygotsky(1978) sociocultural theory emphasizes the importance of social interaction in intellectual development. According to Vygotsky, intellectual development is a social process that occurs through interaction with others, particularly those with more knowledge and experience.

Inquiry

For this paper, we concentrate on mathematics education and rely on a scoping review of the international literature to explore three questions:

• How do teacher preparation programs prepare future teachers in assessment practices?
• What assessment practices do teachers use? How do teachers use assessment to inform instruction?
• What formative assessment interventions have been proven effective among P-K-12 teachers to inform their practice?

We searched peer-reviewed publications in scholarly journals between 2015-2023, including BrowZine Library, EBSCO, EBSCOhost, ERIC, and PsycINFO, using the following keywords: teaching, teacher preparation/ training, formative assessment, assessment-for-learning, mathematics, Randomized Control Trials, international or comparative studies. We collected 263 articles. We selected thirty-three after analyzing them for relevance and methodological rigor (the complete list was omitted due to space limitations).

Secondary Data Analysis

This paper also presents novel empirical evidence from teacher educators evaluating how well their programs prepare teachers for assessment. The data emerges from an extensive IEA comparative survey study of teacher education in mathematics. Teacher educators (N=371) were surveyed in Botswana, Chile, Chinese, Georgia, Germany, Malaysia, Oman, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, and Thailand. The analysis includes descriptive statistics and box plots.

Case Studies
We include two case studies using data collected via observation and interviews at the beginning and end of the school year. One case from England and one from the U.S. illustrate the impact of current educational policies and accountability systems on teachers' ability to assess for deeper learning approaches to teaching and assessing mathematics to secondary students

Findings

Literature review. The literature review confirms that deeper learning is the process of learning for transfer, which enables individuals to apply what they learned in one situation to new situations. This includes content knowledge in a subject area and procedural knowledge of how, why, and when to apply this knowledge to answer questions and solve problems in the subject area. Assessments play a crucial role in engaging learners in deeper learning, and the extent to which these competencies will be emphasized in educational systems depends on their inclusion in assessments (Pellegrino & Hilton,2012). Still, teachers face many challenges in implementing assessments for learning, and there is a need for more emphasis on assessment preparation in teacher education.

The ongoing negative discourse surrounding assessment practices makes it difficult to make a case for the importance of assessment in teacher education, teaching, and learning in many contexts. Popular methods of instruction, such as inquiry-based learning (IBME), have reduced emphasis on assessment, replacing assessment with what the author calls “quasi-assessment practices” such as “discussions,” “noticing,” or similar. IBME proponents advocate that learners should be allowed to learn ‘new to them’ mathematics without being taught by engaging learners in mathematical practices similar to those of practicing mathematicians. However, these and similar instructional methods rest students from minority and disadvantaged populations (or novices) of the background knowledge of their more advantaged kids (experts). Such knowledge could be acquired with more explicit instruction. From a cognitive theory perspective, inquiry-based mathematics classrooms are predicted to be less effective for learners with low prior knowledge, which is often a characteristic of learners from underrepresented groups (Harris-et-al.,2022; Walshaw & Anthony,2008).

Survey. Overall, teacher educators report that only about half of the more than 500 teacher education programs studied in TEDS-M prepare “to a great extent” their future teachers for assessment practices.

Case studies. The first case study was conducted in rural Michigan, USA, and found that current policies and reliance on standardized assessments have deskilled teachers from learning how to assess for deeper learning competencies. The second case study was conducted in East London, England, and demonstrated how a secondary mathematics teacher could implement deep learning and assessment while negotiating accountability demands when teaching a class of children of immigrant refugees/asylum seekers.

• Implications/Contribution

The literature on assessment is extensive, and while there has been increased recognition of the indispensability of formative assessment or assessment for learning, the same literature documents the insufficient implementation of effective assessment practices by teachers and the challenges that exist in helping teachers develop effective instruction. The reasons for these seem to range from teacher education failure to adequately prepare teachers with assessment capabilities to the punitive environment where teachers work mediated by accountability demands which have robbed teachers of their capacity or need to assess as “teaching to the test” seems the order of the day. Fighting against this market-driven force must be the focus of future policy and practice. The perspective introduced in this paper makes an original contribution to the CIES community by shedding light on this essential issue that has yet to receive much attention from UNESCO and the international community of reformers and educators.

Author

• Maria Teresa Tatto, Arizona State University