Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced education design, delivery, and procedures. As such, alternative forms of students’ assessment are being explored by educators all around the world, thereby signalling a definite transition from ‘testing’ to an ‘assessment’ culture. Thus, while the crisis persists, it is crucial to examine innovative assessment methods that preserve mathematics education standards while also taking into account the current environmental and societal constraints imposed by COVID-19 in which mathematics is taught at distance. The study is underpinned by an interpretivist paradigm, a qualitative research approach and a case study design in which data was collected from a total of three mathematics teacher educators, and thirty-five pre-service mathematics education students in a rural university in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Research findings revealed that providing various assessment tasks for engagement reasons without program-wide assessment coordination resulted in several students feeling over-assessed and overwhelmed. Similarly, findings revealed that although mathematics educators endeavoured to employ different range of alternative assessment techniques during the lockdown, they were unable to identify valid assessment techniques owing to a lack of control over mathematics education students. Based on the research findings, it was concluded that while it is undeniable that most educators attempted to maintain the credibility of assessment processes in mathematics education programmes, assessment practices, as well as educators and students’ responses revealed that assessment conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic was clouded by several challenges. The study, therefore, recommends that emphasis should be placed on the use of multimodal technologies for both formative and summative assessment which focuses on problem-solving, decision-making abilities, as well as the cognitive demands possible in online assessment.

Keywords:

Assessment, COVID-19, mathematics teacher education, pandemic, practices.