Using Technology in Formative Assessment: Teachers Beliefs and Practices

This poster presents an ongoing research on teachers' beliefs on Formative Assessment (FA) in mathematics, when technologies are considered. The research involves about 300 mathematics teachers in Italy. The core of the research is to identify how technologies are considered in teachers' beliefs about formative assessment and teachers' perceived needs of a personal professional development. The role of technologies in assessing mathematics is at the center of the international debate (Mackrell, 2015). In particular, for the state of the art on the impact of technologies on formative assessment (Black & William, 1998) see FasMED, 2014. On the other hand, researches on students' and teachers' beliefs on FA show how important is raising teachers' awareness of the nature and the role of FA in mathematics (Bolondi et al., 2016; Ferretti & Lovece, 2015; Michael-Chrysanthou et al., 2014). The core of this research project is to investigate teachers' beliefs and practices about the role of technologies in FA, by using the framework and the tools elaborated within the FamT&L project (http://www.famt-l.eu) for describing teachers' beliefs about Formative Assessment (FA) adapted to the case of IT-based assessment. A second order goal is to address the question of how are teachers' beliefs related to their actual practices in classroom. Method and Some Expected Research Results Our starting point is the questionnaire developed within the FamT&L project (Ferretti & Lovece, 2015; see http://www.famt-l.eu ,WP2 and related deliverables for details) which had been validated through different pilot questionnaires conducted in 5 European countries and used in a range of professional development programs for teachers (pre-service and in-service) also as a tool for detecting teachers' formative needs and raise their awareness. We created a second questionnaire, based on the same theoretical structure, which includes explicit questions about assessment with technologies. The first questionnaire has been administered to 300 teachers participating to a professional development program in Italy, during which the role of formative assessment in mathematics has been discussed, following the FamT&L model. A first map of our populations' beliefs has been drawn, on the base of which a segment of the program has been designed.