Browsing by Subject "formativ bedömning"

The Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education 2014 stresses the role of formative assessment in student assessment in basic education. The national curriculum offers some guidelines for how to work with formative assessment, but a lot is left unsaid. The aim of this thesis was to describe how teachers in secondary school view formative assessment and how they experience working with it. The research questions were; 1. What kind of profit do subject teachers feel the formative assessment has? 2. Which methods do subject teachers use in working with formative assessment and how do they experience this work? 3. Which challenges do subject teachers experience in connection to formative assessment? A qualitative research approach was used in this study and the data material was collected through semi-structured research interviews with eight subject teachers working in secondary school. The data sample was a selective one, consisting of teachers that felt that they were to some level working with formative assessment, even if the new national curriculum was not yet put in to effect in secondary school when the material was collected (spring 2017). The data material was analyzed trough content analysis. The results showed that subject teachers considered the profit of formative assessment to have various aspects, they felt that formative assessment functioned as a support tool for instruction and as a way to motivate and activate students. Formative assessment functioned as a support for instruction in providing the teacher with information about the students' progress and offering the students more feedback and there for helping them perform better. Working with formative assessment was also seen as a chance to motivate students by steering the instruction towards their interest and skills and making sure that everybody received some sort of positive feedback. The teachers also felt that one aim for formative assessment was to activate students and make them understand and take responsibility for their learning. All teachers had worked with self- and peer assessment as methods for formative assessment. They considered peer assessment to be easier to work with because it was easier for the students to give feedback on somebody else's work than to evaluate their own. Both self- and peer assessment required that the students had some sort of understanding of the criteria for the task they were supposed to give feedback on. The teachers had also worked on making learning intensions and criteria more explicit. This work was appreciated by both teachers and students but the challenge was to find enough time, especially when this required planning together with colleagues. Another method for working with formative assessment was discussing with the students, the discussions could be between teacher and student or a classroom dialog. The teachers experienced general challenges in working with formative assessment to be a lack of time and the need to flexible as a teacher.