New Forms of Assessment in the South African Curriculum Assessment Guidelines: What Powers do Teachers Hold? (original) (raw)
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Background: Assessment is one of the components and objects of research in Mathematics Education that, among various functions, ensures/promotes student learning. In this sense, the teachers’ assessment action, and the teaching ways of doing it in the classroom have implications for students’ learning. Objectives: This paper intends to investigate what mathematics teachers do (say they do) when they assess students in their classes. Design: a descriptive qualitative study was carried out. Setting and Participants: Four mathematics teachers working in the 2nd Cycle of General High School Education of Mozambique were selected to participate in the research. Data collection and analysis: individual reflective interviews were conducted, and audio recorded. The accounts were transcribed and submitted to content analysis, in the light of which they were fragmented and grouped into categories of teachers’ assessment actions. Results: Four categories of actions (stimulate, access, interpret, regulate) and nine subcategories (question, give task, request; look, supervise; verify, perceive; give feedback, reorient) emerged from the data collected. The teachers carried out a formative-type assessment, fulfilling a cycle of actions (assessment action cycle) that starts with the stimulus or access and closes in the regulation, from where any of the initial actions were resumed. Conclusions: It can be said that education assessment is one of the motives for reflection and knowledge production in teaching practice.
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In this paper, I interrogate the extent to which a current mathematics teacher education programme at University of KwaZulu-Natal prepares teachers to teach well in the regional context. In order to determine which aspects to consider in the analysis, I draw on studies of factors correlated to learner achievement in South African primary schools. First, this suggests that the consideration of context should play a strong part in our teacher education. Second, it indicates that teacher actions most strongly linked to learning – deep representations, feedback guiding learning and challenging learners on their level – only occur occasionally in KwaZulu-Natal schools, and with limited opportunity to develop mathematical proficiency. The question I raise is to what extent we prepare teachers to teach in this way, and with awareness of the context. Third, I briefly consider what other, perhaps overlooked, competencies our teachers need. In the light of Bernstein’s recognition of the centrality of evaluation in the pedagogic device, I have analysed the exam papers in the programme. My analysis utilises a pragmatically compiled bag of tools. First, I distinguish between the knowledge categories in our programme: contextual knowledge, curriculum knowledge, content knowledge, pedagogic content knowledge, and general pedagogical knowledge. Next, I explore the extent to which specialised knowledge is foregrounded in our programme, drawing on Maton’s distinction between a knowledge and a knower legitimisation code. Third, by distinguishing the semantic gravity of the course content, I aim to identify how theoretical or decontextualised knowledge is linked to the practice of mathematics teaching. This enables me to consider the extent to which the programmes favour cumulative or segmented learning. My findings indicate that the programme is strongly founded in a knowledge code, and that it covers all of the five aforementioned knowledge domains, but it needs further exploration how well these are linked within and across courses, thus providing cumulative learning. Teaching for deep representations is strongly reflected in the exam papers, both in the content knowledge and the pedagogical content knowledge components, but there is virtually no indication that providing appropriate challenges to learners is important. While students are tested on their recognition and realisation of assessing learners’ level of understanding, this is not utilised in teaching students to provide appropriate feedback, nor is it used to inform the design of activities which can cater for a classroom with learners of mixed ability or varying levels of current understanding. Furthermore, there is no assessment of the teachers’ preparedness to teach for adaptive reasoning. In that respect, the programme appears not to prepare the students adequately for quality teaching. I discuss whether this knowledge mix and what is not taught can be seen as having an implicit student in mind, thus limiting access to relevant teacher competencies for some students.
What Mathematics Learners Say About the New South African Curriculum Reform
Perspectives in Education, 2005
Her areas of research and teaching are mathematics education and educational research. In particular her interests are in the relation between mathematics teaching and learning and society including issues of democracy, equity and social justice within theory, policy, research and practice. She is presently the South African project leader for an international study on learners' perspectives of Grade 8 mathematics classrooms across ten countries. NIRMALA GOPAL is currently employed in the Department of Social Work and Criminology at the University of Fort Hare. had been a classroom practitioner for 14 years and engaged curriculum reform at institutional and teacher union levels. She participated as a research assistant in the international study on learners' perspectives of Grade 8 mathematics classrooms. Her masters and doctoral degrees focused on curriculum issues at the level of the national department of education and at the classroom implementation level. Dr. Gopal continues to have an interest in curriculum reform issues as it affects learners at school and tertiary institutions.
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This article reports on Grade 2 teachers’ perceptions of formative assessment in explaining the phenomenon of the underutilisation of formative assessment practices in mathematics teaching. A qualitative and interpretative case study investigated two Grade 2 teachers’ enactment of formative assessment in priority schools in Gauteng. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and observations of lessons. The basic principles of qualitative content analysis were applied during data analysis and guided by the formative assessment theoretical framework proposed by Black and Wiliam (2009). The study revealed that teachers’ enactment of formative assessment was limited by their vague understanding of formative assessment and the tensions between formative assessment and curriculum compliance. The study’s central claim is that teachers may know about formative assessment, but if they do not understand how children learn and engage in mathematics learning, then they are unlikely...
Unveiling the South African official primary maths teacher pedagogic identity
This article is theoretically informed by Bernstein’s (2000) notion of pedagogic identity, supplemented by Tyler’s (1999) elaboration of Bernstein’s theory into an analytical framework that describes four possible identity positions relating to classification and framing properties. The article analyses key primary mathematics curriculum policy documents to investigate the official primary mathematics teacher identity as constructed by both previous and current South African education curricula. The article reveals that the first post-apartheid curriculum, Curriculum 2005 (C2005), projected a ‘therapeutic’ primary mathematics teacher identity with symbolic pedagogical intentions. The recent South African curriculum policy changes to a common curriculum framework (Curriculum and Assessment Policy, CAPS) and universal primary learner tests (Annual National Assessments, ANA) construct and promote a ‘market’ (Bernstein 2000) primary mathematics teacher identity.
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The purpose of the study is to explore the effectiveness of Annual National Assessment (ANA) in monitoring the standard of mathematics education and to assess the mathematical proficiencies tested and exhibited by Grade 9 learners in South Africa. The research problem was premised on the dearth of data that justifies ANA as an evaluative assessment. As such, the study utilised five strands which were; procedural fluency, conceptual understanding, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning and productive dispositions as a theoretical framework to assess mathematics that was tested and exhibited by learners. To explore the research problem, the study used mixed methods in the context of exploratory sequential design. Document analysis was used first to capture mathematics content and cognitive levels examined by ANA. Second, learner responses were explored using four variables of achievement levels; no response, correctly answered, incorrectly answered and partially answered. First, the results from the analysis of ANA questions indicated that ANA mostly tested questions of low complexity. Second, the results from the learners' responses revealed that the majority of learners were not proficient to ANA irrespective of low complexity testing. Third, the Porter's alignment index for ANA and TIMSS was between moderate and perfect. Subsequently, content and cognitive levels were misaligned in the three consecutive years of ANA testing. It implies that learners were most likely to show a deficit of higher order problems solving skills which are a prerequisite of courses in advanced mathematics. Additionally, the results suggest that ANA had challenges of reliability and validity as an evaluative assessment due to inconsistency in the testing. As such, it is recommended that the complexity of ANA be addressed, the content areas where learners are not proficient be addressed and the alignment of ANA must be frequently calculated to monitor the standard of mathematics education in South Africa effectively.
This paper is informed by Bernstein's notion of pedagogic identity and Morgan's (Morgan, 1998, Morgan, Tsatsaroni and Lerman , 2002) study of mathematics teachers' orientations in assessment practice. These are used to identify primary maths teachers' positions and identities in the current South African education context characterised by an emphasis on monitoring through standardised national learner tests. The paper draws on data obtained from interactive interviews with nine sampled primary maths teachers who were participants in a numeracy in-service education community of practice. Using Bernstein's four pedagogic identity classes and relating these to Morgan's maths teachers' orientations we identify primary maths positions being taken up by the sampled teachers in relation to the Annual National Assessment (ANA) tests. The research indicates that most of the primary maths teachers' say that their practices are being influenced by the ANAs, alth...