Supporting primary school teachers’ classroom assessment in mathematics education: effects on student achievement

In a three-phase study, with a total of 40 third-grade teachers and their 830 students, teachers were supported to use classroom assessment techniques (CATs) to reveal their students’ knowledge of number operations. In phase I, four teachers and 66 third-grade students participated in five monthly workshops in which CATs were co-designed and their use was discussed. In phase II, the first phase was replicated with four workshops with six different teachers and 148 third-grade students. In these two exploratory phases, we evaluated student achievement on a standardized national mathematics test in a pre-/posttest design and compared changes herein to changes in the national norm sample. In phase III, a control condition was added to the design to experimentally investigate the effect on student achievement with 30 teachers and 616 third-grade students. Teachers were randomly assigned to participate in 0, 1, 2, or 3 1-hour workshops. In all three phases, we found a significant increase in students’ mathematics achievement scores on the standardized mathematics test. In phase III, the increase was significantly larger in the classes of teachers participating in three workshops than in classes with less workshops. Additionally, results from the analysis of classroom observations, feedback forms, and interviews indicate that teachers could easily integrate the CATs into their practice and could gather valuable information on their students. The results from the different phases of this study combined indicate that supporting teachers in their development and use of classroom assessment in mathematics may contribute to the improvement of students’ mathematics achievement.