How can the prison context change teachers' perspective and practices about mathematic assessment?

Overview & Synopsis

Rationale and theoretical frameworkBlack and Wiliam (2009) use the term 'assessment' to refer to all those practices, involving both teachers and students, that provide information that can be used to modify teaching and learning activities. Assessment can be differentiated by its purposes: formative assessment (FA), or assessment for learning, and summative assessment (SA) or assessment of learning (Black & Wiliam, 2009). Generally, in ordinary Italian classrooms there is a preponderance of SA (Amado & Morselli, 2023); teachers are frequently not aware of the distinction between FA and SA and assess students' learning through written and oral tests which involve a single student called to the blackboard, performing in front of the teacher and peers (Pastore et al., 2019). The role of the context in which the entire learning-teaching process takes place is crucial to better understand teachers' perspectives and practices regarding assessment (Wong et al., 2016). This is particularly true in the multi-complexity of a prison school context, which is characterised by: (i) heterogeneous classes in terms of age (from 14 to 70 years old), socio-cultural and linguistic background, literacy and personal experiences; continue turnover of students (usually up to 10 students); (ii) frequent experiences of failure encountered by students in their educational paths, in particular in mathematics, and (iii) the fact that "evaluation" in the sense of "judgment" permeates any prison setting (Decembrotto & Maffia, 2024). Furthermore, there is a lack of literature on the issue of mathematics education in the prison context and, even more, on the specific issue regarding assessment. We present the preliminary results derived from the "Learning Math in Prison" project (LeMP) with the aim to highlight if and how, the prison context can overturn some of the teachers' perspectives and practices related to assessment in mathematics compared to those of teachers' in ordinary schools.