In the master thesis we were primarily interested in finding out how primary school teachers perceive formative assessment and what differences can be detected in the frequency of formative assessment activities used in class. In light of the set goal, we first performed a historical overview of the concepts’ development - from the behaviourist curricular evaluation in the 60s of the last century to today's constructivist understanding of assessment for learning. Next, we turned our attention to the development of the Slovenian formative assessment model and also highlighted some dilemmas concerning translation of the term formative assessment to Slovene term formativno spremljanje. Since it is a concept that that was originally formed in the Anglo-Saxon world, we then analysed the similarities and differences between formative assessment and related concepts previously already present Slovenia - the didactic principle of learning activity, the didactic principle of differentiation and individualization of the learning process, pre-grading knowledge verification and the knowledge assessment that comes by the end of learning process and is typically associated with final grading of students’ knowledge. Since the desire to replace the existing model of final knowledge assessment with formative assessment is present among some Slovenian authors, we also reflected on these intentions.
For the purpose of research, we collected the answers of 214 respondents by the use of questionnaire. With the help of the collected answers, we then examined various aspects of teachers' understandings of formative assessment - from the point of enabling learning activity, student motivation for learning, learning individualization and from the point of perception of the relation between formative assessment, pre-grading verification of acquired knowledge and final knowledge assessment which is typically associated with final grading. On a smaller scale we also analysed the frequency of formative assessment activities used during the in-class lessons - e.g. collection of evidence about the learning achievements of students, involvement of students in the planning of learning goals and criteria for their achievement, and active involvement of students in the final evaluation of their own knowledge. In the empirical part, we answered fourteen research questions. Two of the insights we managed to come to are that formative assessment is in Slovenia mostly carried out by teachers with many years of experience in practice, from which it can be assumed that teachers are mostly introduced to the concept by entering school practice, and that almost half of the teachers agree with the idea that formative assessment should replace existing final knowledge assessment, even though the majority perceives it as a form of pre-grading knowledge verification.
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