Formative value of descriptive grades in mathematics instruction for beginners

Abstract

Descriptive grading has been implemented in the first grade of primary school in the Republic of Serbia from 2003. The monitoring of this system novelty has been absent since research community most often dealt with teachers’ attitudes and their self-evaluation of the competences for descriptive grading. This form of grading, which stems from the social constructivist paradigm, is observed as the trigger of development of the formative approach in assessment, which has been in the focus of theoreticians and practitioners in the past thirty years, especially in the United States of America and Great Britain. The method of content analysis was applied to 316 descriptive grades in mathematics given to first grade primary students. The quality of three key elements was assessed: the description of academic achievement, the description of students’ engagement and the recommendations to achieve further progress, as well as the balance of quality between the elements of the same descriptive grade. Research results have shown that descriptive grades mostly lack the necessary formative capacity. This means that the majority of students this sample of grades was prepared for did not receive quality and comprehensive feedback, which would be conducive for their further education. Formative assessment, as one of the implications of the constructivist theoretical grounding, demands a high level of development of teacher competences for monitoring the progress and assessing the students, which has not been confirmed in the present research.