Assessment Practices in Mathematics: Local to Global Contexts

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the present mathematics assessment practices in local and global contexts. For this, I decisively review educational policies, practices, curricular documents and contemporary researches. In doing so, I select the Finland, China, USA, as they have stood in the significant positions in an international comparative study such as TIMSS, PISA and Nepal. It reveals that the assessment practices in mathematics are not an isolated phenomenon that have been executed by an external authority at the end of the academic sessions to quantify the individual attributes relating to mathematical performances. It is largely embedded in educational activities from the very beginning and simultaneously works throughout the programme for enriching mathematical outcomes and performances of students. I capture two major trends of assessment practices of these countries; post-positivist approaches of assessment and integral approaches of assessment. The post/positivist perspective incorporates summative evaluation techniques and assessment of learning whereas integral perspectives concentrate on assessment for learning as having broad goals of reconstructing, reframing and transforming the entire programs. These trends of assessment practice largely blend with philosophy of mathematics education. The comparing and contrasting views of assessment practices would be helpful for the policy makers, educators, mathematicians and other related personnel for critically re-evaluate their respective assessment practices and thus encourage to transform the deep-rooted conventional assessment practice that is one of the major hindrance to sanction the mathematics education within the positivistic paradigm. The Sapta Gandaki JournalVol. IX, 2018 Feb. Page: 1-16

The Asian Conference on Education & International Development 2024 Official Conference Proceedings

“…Some critics are regarding its implementation, statistical analysis, interpretations, and immense influence on a country's education. Another critique is on the use of context for the problems which is incompatible with the culture of the country-testtaker as assessing mathematics achievement is related to a country's educational activities (Lamichhane, 2018). Thus, to ascertain of more valid and constructive results, a country should develop its own localised assessment, in which its contexts and characteristics is in accordance with a country's culture (White, 2017;White, 2018).…”

Drama-Based Pedagogy: Ways of Engaging in Mathematics Learning

“…Many research scholars (Luitel, 2009;Lamichhane, 2017Lamichhane, , 2018Pant, 2016;Lamichhane & Belbase, 2017) have mentioned elsewhere that there is a blaming culture in mathematics education programs of Nepal. No one is ready to take sole responsibility for mathematics education, and it becomes an unclaimed entity at the crossroads.…”

“…Mathematical othering concerns the relationship between mathematics and learners (teachers and students) that occurs as a result of its curricular, pedagogical and ways of assessing students' outcomes. Decontextualized, ahistorical and isolated curriculum practices (Luitel, 2018), pedagogical emphasis on memorization, speed, and reproduction (Pant et al, 2020;Lamichhane & Luitel, 2022), externally executed standardized approach to assessing students' outcomes (Lamichhane, 2018) and ignorance of onto-epistemic practices of non-Western countries (Lamichhane & Luitel, 2023) are some of the causes behind the mathematical othering in which students rarely see the connection between official knowledge they engage in schools and universities and the mathematics they experience in their lifeworlds (Wager, 2012;Abtahi et al, 2020). Mathematics become an elite discipline and only be a part of the academic lives of learners at schools and universities but not embedded in their lifeworlds.…”

Challenges of social justice in mathematics classrooms

“…Nepal’s school education has been critiqued for the poor quality of classroom organization, teaching–learning, and teacher performance (Kandel 2018 ). The poor quality of education has been factored on teacher training (Gautam 2016 ), underlying traditional philosophical foundation of education (Luitel 2009 ), convention of paper–pencil assessment (Lamichhane 2018 ), and decontextualized curriculum and pedagogy (Wagle et al 2019 ).…”