The teaching of mathematics and the external evaluation of schools: a study involving teachers from 1st to 6th grade

Abstract

The processes and practices of Portuguese education and training are becoming increasingly integrated in agendas globally structured, and whose area of influence is placed in the common frame of European Union policies and transnational organisms such as OCDE (Pacheco, 2009). Evaluation has been acquiring, in the last decades, a critical role, extrapolating its importance beyond the field of education (Afonso, 2010). The emphasis given to schools evaluation derives from two trends that affect most European countries: the decentralization of means and the creation of national goals and of levels of school results (Eurydice, 2011). Departing from the political and economic analysis of globalization on education and making a critical approach to the policies of sharing (Takayama, 2008), it is aimed to analyze the mediation of the pressure applied by curricula policies of homogenization and standardization of results (Afonso, 2012; Santiago, Donaldson, Looney & Nusche,2012) and their influence on teachers of Mathematics. This quantitative study, involves a questionnaire survey to teachers from 1st to 6th grade and primary teachers, in which it is ascertained how the model of external evaluation, implemented in Portugal since 2006, has been contributing to the creation of concrete consequences in school results, namely on the standards of evaluation, and on the dominance of summative tests in Mathematics, taking in account the curricular changes and teaching changes.