Abstract
The concept of formative evaluation has spread to many countries of the world in the last few years (Starý, 2007; Looney, 2009; Marshall, 2011; McMillan, 2007). Black and William (1998; 2005) moved the quality formative assessment, and empirically demonstrated the causal relationship between formative assessment and the provision of better learning outcomes of students.
OECD was implemented on formative assessment in an extensive project which described the formative assessment in German, French, and English literature, and also on case studies of particular schools in eight developed countries (OECD, 2005). The concept of formative assessment can be understood not only as a theoretical concept, but it is also noticeably headed towards the teaching practice of school education (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & William, 2003; 2004).
To a certain extent, it reassesses priorities in the perspective of teaching quality. The concept of formative assessment is very broad for empirical validation, and it is not easy to understand it in its complexity.
Therefore, we decided to focus in the context of formative assessment on methods of teacher's work with educational aims, and their usage in providing feedback to pupils. One of the key assumptions of quality student learning is generally considered to be an understanding of what is to be taught, where the educational activities are aimed, and how to find out that they master the specific knowledge and skills.
For this purpose, some specific learning strategies have been developed, such as goal setting and providing feedback, advanced organizers, and note taking, as well as final summarizing. All these strategies support not only the understanding of teaching content, but also its effective fixation in pupils' long-term memory (Marzano, Gaddy, & Dean, 2000; Hattie 2009).
The aim of setting goals in education is to give a clearer structure to students' learning processes. If the learning objectives have to serve students well, it has to be understood by students, and students should identify with them.
The giving feedback is essentially related to the setting of goals. If it is not clear to the students where they are going, they can hardly be given information about how they are doing.
Positive impact of continuous feedback on the learning process has been clearly research demonstrated (Torrance & Pryor, 2001; Chappuis, 2005; Marshall, 2011; Shepard, 2012;). At the theoretical level, knowledge about the use of learning goals and connection of goals with assessment in the Czech classroom are sufficiently widespread, they are also an integral part of initial and continuing teacher education in didactics.
However, school education research suggests that the specific formative assessment methods appear sporadically within the real teaching in the classroom, and traditional approaches to evaluation persist (e.g. Dvořák at al., 2010; Novotná & Krabsová, 2013).
Explicit setting of the learning objectives is rare in mainstream Czech schools, and the culture of classroom assessment has been underestimated over a long period (Santiago et al., 2012). We believe that the actions in improving teachers 'competency to set goals and give effective formative feedback should be predated by real understanding (goal) What is the reality of setting goals and assessing at Czech schools and What are teachers' beliefs about setting goals and assessment (research questions).
This knowledge would help us to state realist goals and introduces sensitive approaches in teacher training. Method Given that our intention is to understand the real teaching situations in depth, we decided to use a qualitative research approach.
We have specified the main research questions: What goals are set by teachers? How do teachers communicate learning objectives to pupils? How do teachers find out that pupils fulfil educational goals? How do teachers asses the pupils? How they give them the feedback? We have collected data about the educational objectives in a real classroom, on the basis of thorough observation and analysis of school documents (classification schedules, rules, evaluations) and classroom artefacts associated with the students' assessment and evaluation (students' written works, tests, notes). We have also tried to reveal the educational goals of teachers in the interviews with them.
The sample was 10 teachers from primary school classes and 10 teachers from lower secondary classes. We covered schools in urban and rural environment, small and big, mainstream and selective.
One of the teachers' sample selection criteria was their expertise. We decided on social sciences teachers (Civics, History, Human geography).
The choice of curricular area was selected because of team members' qualifications and research experience. The observation of teaching was direct and indirect (from video recording) and was done at 2 -5 lessons of every involved teacher. 60 lessons were observed.
All of the observation were done by a researcher and were registered in the semi-structured observation sheets. In-depth interviews with involved 20 teachers were conducted.
All interviews were recorded, transcribed into written text, and analysed in MAXQ DA software for qualitative research. The texts from school/ class documents, classroom artefacts and the observation sheets were also analysed by the same software In order to ensure the quality of the research, the data were supplemented on the principle of triangulation by other relevant sources - products, teachers, and pupils.
There were, for example, written lesson preparations, corrected written work, students' notes in exercise books, and more. Data analysis used the sustainable practice research design of grounded theory approach by Charmaz K. (2006), which corresponds to the subtle or transcendental realism epistemological point of view (Maxwell 2005).
Expected Outcomes The analyses of the data are in the process and will be finished in next month. The text bellow is based on the preliminary findings.
Researched teachers do not state educational objectives at the beginning of their lessons, some of them state just the topic of the lesson. More often they state the methods that would be used in the lesson at the beginning of it.
Quite often (especially at primary school lessons) is the intendent concealment the goal of the lesson with step by step detection of it by pupils that should (according the teachers) motivate children. However, relatively big number of lessons have a clear and logical structure and end by summarizing what pupils have learnt even this summarizing is usually too general and do not have effective feedback function.
From the interviews with teachers we know that primary school teachers see the goal of social studies very often in building the "soft" skills and competences (esp. communicative and social) and the subject matter is a little underestimated. Both teachers primary and secondary schools do not like assessing pupils and view assessments as demotivating.
However, as they have to asses, many of them (especially at primary level) asses mainly the success of children. There is a big difference among researched teachers in their ability to use formative assesment technics and strategies.
Some of them introduce peer evaluation and/or self evaluation systematically into their teaching, few of them state assessment criteria to scaffold pupils, some of them end the lessons by reflection or evaluation, two of them show high expectations to their pupils. There were also teachers that use assessment as a tool of punishment of pupils or a tool for disciplining the class.