Assessment Practices of Secondary School Mathematics Teachers in Guraghe Zone

Abstract

This paper was intended to examine mathematics teacher’s practices of assessment techniques used in secondary schools in Guraghe Zone and attempt to explore methods of assessment used by mathematics teachers, nature of feedback provided to student and the support provided by school authorities to enable them undertake assessment effectively. For this study, mixed research approach, inferential statistics and descriptive survey method would be employed; both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered through questionnaire, document analysis, FGD and interviews. The total sample sizes of the study were 377 students and all mathematics teachers in the selected schools. In addition thirteen school principals were interviewed. In the selection of the sample population, stratified sampling, systematic random sampling and purposive samplings were used. Thus, the findings indicate that, the overall respondents’ perception towards practices of continuous assessment has mean 3.630 and standard deviation 1.063 which is medium perception. In addition to this, the result showed that the first challenging step to implement Continuous assessment is large class size; the second is lack of in-services training, the third is it takes time and the last challenging step is shortage of teaching materials. Study showed that most of the teachers use the traditional feedback mechanism for continuous assessment which is not recommendable and had to use the enhanced feedback to encourage the learners’ capacity. So, concerned bodies of the zone education office and schools should give support by providing teaching materials and giving training for teachers in order to increase and develop their assessment practices in theimplementation Continuous assessment.