MOTIVATION FOR MATHEMATICS THROUGH FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT

How can teachers increase student motivation? A hard question for all of us. One of the answers is formative assessment – a set of tools and approaches that help students and teachers with assessing knowledge. Teachers use it to prepare lessons, to find their students’ weak spots and to improve their knowledge. Students can use it to identify what are their strong suits and where they still have to improve their knowledge and understanding. Through formative assessment students gain self-esteem, a better insight into their knowledge and a better understanding of learning itself.

Formative assessment is a way of teaching. Schoenfeld (2015) has shown, that using formative assessment through questions supports important aspects of learning – cooperation, conceptually rich mathematics, the ability to research and much more. A research (Wiliam, 2011) has shown, that encouraging students to ask questions to themselves and self-evaluate, can increase progress by almost 100 %. Of course, just asking questions doesn’t guarantee success. Questions themselves must lead on the path to understanding, direct and make students think independently. By asking questions the students take over responsibility for learning, as they are set before a question. Students first have to answer the question to themselves, think it through and in the end check their answer – be it with their colleague or teacher. Fact is (Hattie, 2013), that formative assessment effects learning with a factor 1,13, which presents more than a 50 % higher success in learning.

How did my teaching go? At the end of each section we prepared quality criteria and I prepared questions leading them toward achieving criteria. Students said (all the respondents) that the quality criteria combined with questions helped them learn, since they knew exactly what they still have to learn and what it is they don’t yet fully comprehend. An example of quality criteria in the section Function is “I draw a set of points in perpendicular coordinate system”.

The questions arguments I prepared helping them, were:
- What is the coordinate system composed of?
- What are the important features of the coordinate system?
- How can you explain the meaning of point coordinates?
- Show the difference between < and > by example.
- What do mathematical symbols “and” and “or” represent when drawing a set of points?
- Explain, why do we use full and dotted lines when drawing a set of points.

This is an example of how students gradually developed knowledge of drawing a set of points in a coordinate system, paid attention to important features and followed key elements of drawing a set of points in a coordinate system.

After a whole school year of teaching using formative assessment I’ve evaluated the work done. The students filled out a questionnaire at the beginning and at the end of the school year. The results are incredible. At the beginning of the school year 57% of students said they dislike mathematics and only 29% liked it. At the end of the school year 75% of students said they like mathematics and are motivated to learn it. This is just one of the aspects of success using formative assessment and my opinion is, that the students respond positively, get more out of class and are more motivated.