Blind versus visible checkbox grading: Does not seeing the grades when assessing mathematics enhance inter-rater reliability?

Digital exams often fail in assessing all required mathematical skills. Therefore, it is advised that large-scale exams still feature some handwritten open answer questions. However, assessing those handwritten questions with multiple assessors is often a daunting task in terms of grading reliability and feedback. This paper presents a grading approach using semi-automated assessment with atomic feedback. Exam designers preset atomic feedback items with partial grades; next, assessors should just tick the items relevant to a student's answer, even allowing 'blind grading' where the underlying grades are not shown to the assessors. The approach might lead to a smoother and more reliable correction process in which feedback can be communicated to students and not solely grades. The experiment took place during a large-scale math exam organized by the Flemish Exam Commission, and this paper includes preliminary results of assessors' and students' impressions

Let’s Team Up! Measuring Student Teachers’ Perceptions of Team Teaching Experiences

Since collaboration within schools gains importance and is considered significant for teachers’ professional development in order to meet the new 21st-century educational demands, teacher education institutes show a growing interest in field experiences inspired by collaborative learning, such as team teaching. Team teaching is a teaching model in which (student) teachers work collaboratively in the preparation, teaching and evaluation of a course. In order to assess team teaching practices in teacher education by monitoring perceptions of collaborative team teaching experiences, an instrument is needed that offers insights to guide the learning process and support well-founded decision making. Therefore, an easy-to-use quantitative questionnaire to explore student teachers’ team teaching perceptions was developed and validated in four stages: an extensive literature review (1) resulting in a preliminary questionnaire containing advantages and disadvantages of team teaching (2). Next, a pilot study was conducted with 14 student teachers (3), followed by a further validation and reliability study based on exploratory factor analysis, peer debriefing, confirmatory factor analysis and internal consistency analysis with 181 participating student teachers (4). The final questionnaire comprises 29 Likert-items in four scales – collaboration, co-creation, coaching and complexity – and appears to be both valid and reliable

What went well, what went badly? Teachers’ and students’ perspectives on remote mathematics teaching during pandemic school closure

When schools closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, mathematics teachers and their students were confronted with emergency remote mathematics teaching (ERMT). To investigate how they experienced this in the first months, we set up an online questionnaire for mathematics teachers and their students in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium), Germany, and the Netherlands. The questionnaire contained two open items, in which respondents were asked to report on what went well and what went badly during ERMT. The responses of 1599 teachers and 2196 students were analyzed using a theory-based codebook with the code families: teaching practices, didactics, assessment, situational circumstances, and student behavior. Among the main results, we find that both teachers and students report positively on the ERMT teaching practices that student-teacher interaction is an important topic and that teachers struggle with assessment in ERMT. These findings seem in agreement to other research findings. For future research, we recommend monitoring whether these experiences persist after longer periods of ERMT

Distance mathematics education in Flanders, Germany, and the Netherlands during the COVID 19 lockdown: —the student perspective

In March 2020, many schools worldwide were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This closure confronted mathematics teachers with the challenging transition to emergency remote teaching (ERT). How did students experience ERT, and how did these experiences relate to context variables and to their teachers’ beliefs and practices? In particular, what didactic approaches and formative assessment practices did secondary mathematics students experience, and which beliefs did they hold concerning digital mathematics education? How were these student experiences and beliefs related to student context variables (gender, need to support family, personal home equipment), teacher beliefs, delivery modes, and student appreciation of mathematics? To investigate these issues, we set out online questionnaires for mathematics teachers and their students in Flanders—the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium—, Germany, and the Netherlands. Data consisted of completed questionnaires by 323 mathematics teachers and 2126 of their students. Results show that even though students preferred regular face-to-face teaching, they were content with the quality of their teachers’ distance mathematics teaching. Students reported that they were taught new topics often, but did not experience teachers initiating peer feedback. High student appreciation of mathematics, good home environment, and more synchronous delivery of ERT were related to ERT experiences and more positive beliefs concerning digital mathematics education. These findings have implications for ERT teaching strategies in future, as well as for hybrid teaching practices