Mathematics teachers' conceptions about the functions of assessment in compulsory education

The results of a research study on mathematics teachers' conceptions about the functions of assessment in compulsory education are presented. The data correspond to a set of interviews carried out with 50 primary and secondary education teachers from 18 state schools located in the suburban area of Barcelona, together with samples of classroom assessment materials provided by the teachers. As a point of departure, we took the teachers' beliefs about the effects of assessment on four dimensions of the educational process: learning processes, teaching processes, certification or account giving of students' performance, and account giving of the teachers' work. The analysis allowed us to identify five conceptions on assessment: extreme pedagogic, mixed pedagogic, mixed undefined, mixed societal and extreme societal. These conceptions are unequally distributed along both compulsory school levels, with some tendencies that might show some relationship with the intrinsic tension between the by-default co-occurrence of both pedagogic and account giving functions of assessment in school and their relative weight in each school level.