Abstract:

One of the main lacks in teacher training is the gap between theoretical lectures at university and day-by-day practice in the primary education classroom. Despite the internship period is established on solving this gap, sometimes this internship is more focused on specific subjects rather than on general ones, as Spanish or Mathematics. Therefore, our aim was to develop a specific training that can help the students in acquiring skills regarding formative assessment, based on feed-back theories about assessment, and particularly in self-assessment and co-assessment.

The work was part of an innovative educational project developed within our university. It was performed on the virtual campus (powered by Moodle) and focused on problem solving. Three activities were proposed, the first two were based on PISA assessment released items, and the third one consisted on much more open-ended problem. All the three tasks were developed in two stages: first solving the task and second assessing it.

First task consisted of solving and self-assessing a task taken from PISA released items, with a quite close set of assessment criteria, so that we could check not only the ability of solving the question but also the goodness of fit to the criteria when self-assessing the task. Second task consisted also in a PISA released item, and after solving, the students must assess someone else’s work. The third task was about building a problem under certain constraints, solving it, and explaining why the provided wording and solution were correct. In the second stage of this task, every student’s work was co-assessed by other two colleagues, who must judge the solution and the explanations with quite much broader criteria. Thus, we wanted to value how the students solve the problems, how do they fit to the provided assessing criteria and how were they able to assess under more subjective/open criteria than the PISA ones.

Results show an increasing degree of difficulty when the criteria were less detailed (particularly in the third task), but also a good degree of reflection about own and else’s performance for solving. Apart from results regarding the problems, we apply two questionnaires (the first one after finishing the first two tasks, the second one after finishing the third task) about the difficulties that they found in the tasks of solving, self-assessing and co-assessing. The overall result was very positive, so that we are going to plan more tasks of this type in our teaching for the next academic year, since we are empowering teacher students with metacognitive tools about their future work in a crucial task as it is assessing students.

Keywords:

Co-assessment, Moodle, self-assessment, teacher training.