One of the main aims of the Erasmus+KA3 project entitled “Promoting Formative Assessment: From Theory to Policy and Practice (FORMAS)” is to contribute in improving secondary teachers’ assessment skills by supporting them to conduct assessment for formative reasons and through this to promote their students’ learning outcomes in Mathematics (cognitive and meta-cognitive). To achieve this purpose, the research team of this project developed a comprehensive framework for measuring teachers’ assessment skills and established a valid instrument to measure teachers’ professional needs as well as instruments measuring students’ Mathematics learning outcomes (cognitive and meta-cognitive). Also, a Teacher Professional Development (TPD) course on assessment based on the main assumptions of the Dynamic Approach (DA) has been designed and used in this project. The DA recognises the importance of involving teachers in critical reflection upon their practice and supporting them to develop and implement their own improvement strategies and action plans. Thus, a TPD course based on the DA was offered to teachers during the school year 2019-2020. The last step of the DA is concerned with the investigation of the impact of the course on promoting student learning outcomes through improving the teaching practice. Consequently, in this report, the impact of this TPD course on improving teachers’ assessment skills and through that on promoting student learning outcomes in Mathematics (cognitive and meta-cognitive) is examined. More specifically, in the first part of this report we refer to main methods of the second phase of this project (i.e., intervention study) and in the second part its main findings are presented. 

 

 

 

 

In this report we summarize the main activities and refer to the main intellectual outputs/deliverables. Therefore, in the first part of this report we describe the main phases of our project to give an overview of the methodology that was followed in our project as well as to help the readers understand the main implementation steps. In the second part of this report, a critical analysis of the national policies on formative assessment (of the four participating countries) is provided. In the third part of this report, we present the comprehensive framework that was developed for measuring teacher assessment skills and in the fourth part, we discuss about how professional standards for formative assessment have been established. In this fifth part, we briefly present the TPD course on assessment based on the main assumptions of the DA and in the sixth part the methods and results of a group randomization study that was conducted to evaluate the impact of this TPD course on improving teachers’ assessment skills and on improving student learning outcomes in mathematics (cognitive and meta-cognitive), are presented. In the last part of this report, we draw implications of the main findings of this project (presented in parts 2 to 6) for research, policy and practice.