What Do You Think about INVALSI Tests? School Directors, Teachers and Students from Lombardy Describe Their Experience

Abstract

The qualitative study «Promoting the culture of evaluation at school. The INVALSI experience at school» conducted between 2011 by a research team from the University of Milan-Bicocca collected the ideas, opinions and perceptions of school actors on the INVALSI learning assessment experience. Adopting a «multi-vocal perspective», through individual and focus group interviews the viewpoints of different stakeholders within each school (nr. 16) have been examined: school directors (nr. 12), teachers of all grade levels (nr. 106) -some of them referents for the INVALSI evaluation in their school, and middle and high school students (nr. 100) who took INVALSI tests three or four times during their school career. The interpretative hypothesis, confirmed by the present study, considered that the organizational and communication procedures implemented by INVALSI, before and during test administration and correction, and especially during the process of returning the results, have important effects on the perceived quality of national evaluation in schools, on how the tests are proposed to students by school directors and teachers, and ultimately on the students' attitude towards the tests. The experiences collected in this study seem to mirror the antinomy described in literature between accountability and program evaluation, social

Assessment Practices and Beliefs: Teachers’ Perspectives on Assessment during Long Distance Learning

“…A teacher's autonomy in the assessment processes is strongly defended. This explains the hard debates and the reactions against the introduction, in the Italian system, of a standardized external assessment focused on mathematics and Italian, which started in 2008: the so-called INVALSI tests [50][51][52]. Several analyses show that there is a very low correlation between internal assessments and external assessments: for instance, between the final grades at the end of secondary school and the results from university admission tests [53][54][55].…”

Combining Students’ Grades and Achievements on the National Assessment of Knowledge: A Fuzzy Logic Approach

“…The results obtained by students in the INVALSI test are measured on a quantitative Rasch scale, where 200 is the mean and the standard deviation is 40 [38,39]; a similar method is used by the PISA [40] and TIMSS [41] evaluations. INVALSI tests are an objective measure of students' knowledge [42].…”