The main purpose of the thesis was to develop and evaluate a model by which teachers in teaching mathematics could systematically develop self-assessment skills in students. Students’ self-assessment is one of the important skills. It is related to students’ ability to self-regulate learning, to the development of metacognitive thinking skills, to the formed self-concept and to students’ involvement in the process of formative assessment. Developing student’s skills of self-assessment is also one of the goals of implementation of the concept of lifelong learning. With the assessment of their knowledge, students develop their learning competence. Developing self-assessment skills makes an important contribution to quality learning and better learning achievements. The theoretical part of the doctoral thesis presents the concept of self-assessment of mathematical knowledge and the related concepts, the implementation of self-assessment in the learning process and its significance in the process of students’ learning, the existing models and techniques of self-assessment of knowledge as well as the review of the research related to self-assessment skills in mathematics teaching. The empirical part introduces a theoretically-based model for developing self-assessment in mathematics teaching. One of the important goals of the empirical part of the thesis was also to study the students' mechanisms (using sources of information, criteria and standards) of self-assessment of mathematical knowledge through the learning stages of new learning content and its consolidation, based on which a deeper insight into how the self-assessment process takes place with the students and how teachers can help students in developing these skills was gained. Our research involved 6 mathematics teachers and 164 students of the 7th grade of primary school. The research combined both the quantitative and the qualitative research approach. The research was conducted in 4 phases, within which the existing situation was examined, the teachers trained to implement the model of self-assessment developing, and the efficiency of the model for improving the students’ self-assessment of mathematical knowledge was evaluated. The designed model represents an important and original contribution not only to pedagogical and didactic science but also to the special didactics of mathematics, since such a model has not yet been developed in the scientific literature. Additionally, students' self-assessment mechanisms in mathematics teaching have not been precisely studied so far. The results of the research have shown that with the designed model we can efficiently develop students' mechanisms for better quality self-assessment of mathematical knowledge. The model has proved to be easy and flexible to use in teaching. Additionally, the obtained research results have provided a deeper insight into the performance of students’ self-assessment mechanisms, which helped us to develop guidelines for teachers how to develop students' skills in self-assessment of mathematical knowledge.
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