Pixel International Conferences

Formative assessment has been prevalent in the educational discourse over the past decades, shifting attention towards assessment practices that aid the learning and teaching process. The impact of formative assessment on student achievement has been widely documented; leading to the acknowledgment of formative assessment as a determining factor of educational effectiveness at both the classroom and the school level. This study uses a framework that allows us to measure teachers’ assessment skills and examines whether these skills explain variation in student achievement in mathematics. The framework investigates teacher skills in using different techniques of assessment by taking into account the four phases of assessment (i.e., construction and administration of assessment instruments, recording and analyzing data, and reporting results to students and parents). It also takes into account the following five dimensions which describe the functioning of each effectiveness factor concerned with teacher behavior in the classroom: frequency, focus, stage, quality, and differentiation. Data of teachers’ assessment skills and student achievement were collected at the beginning and the end of the school year. Based on the analysis of the assessment skills data, it was found out that these skills are grouped into four types of behaviour which are discerned in a distinctive way and move gradually from skills associated with everyday assessment routines to more advanced skills concerned with differentiation in assessment. Using student mathematics achievement data as criteria of effectiveness it was found out that teachers implementing more advanced types of assessment behaviour were found to have better student outcomes. The methods and main results are presented and implications of findings are drawn.