ABSTRACT
Lockdowns imposed by many countries on their populations at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis forced teachers to adapt quickly and without adequate preparation to distance teaching. In this paper, we focus on one of the most formidable challenges that teachers faced during the lockdowns and even in the post-lockdown emergency period, namely, developing assessment that maintains the pedagogical continuity that educational institutions typically require. Based on the results of a previous study, focused on the analysis of answers to an open-ended questionnaire administered to a population of 700 teachers from France, Germany, Israel and Italy, a semi-structured interview series was designed and implemented by the authors of this paper with a small group of teachers. The transcripts of these interviews were analysed according to the interpretative phenomenological analysis methodology, with the aim of investigating teachers' own perspectives on the following: (a) the difficulties with which they had to contend, with respect to the question of assessment; (b) the techniques adopted to deal with these difficulties; and (c) the ways in which the lockdown experience could affect the future evolution of teachers' assessment practices. This analysis supported us in formulating hypotheses concerning the possible long-term effects of lockdown on modes of assessment in mathematics.
ABSTRACT
This study aims to explore how teachers from four countries--France, Israel, Italy, and Germany--manage their teaching--learning activity in the context of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. About 700 teachers from the four countries participated in this study. They were given an online questionnaire that involved 22 open-ended items, in which they were requested to complete the items that were structured taking into account the relationships between teacher, students, mathematics and resources. The qualitative analysis of teachers' answers was carried out, referring to both the meta-didactical transposition model and Bishop's framework on values to investigate teachers' teaching-learning activities and the reasons underlying their choices. The empirical analysis suggests four tasks corresponding to the main challenges that teachers had to face during the time of lockdown: (a) managing distance learning to support students' learning through specific methodologies;(b) managing distance learning to develop assessment;(c) managing distance learning to support those students that face difficulties and/or are living a difficult situation/developing inclusive teaching;and (d) managing distance learning to exploit its potentialities for fostering typical mathematical processes. The values that motivated the teachers to change their teaching-learning activities are discussed, conclusions of how the time of lockdown affects the mathematics teaching is drawn, and finally, recommendations and insights from this study are shared.