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Students’ attitudes and responses to pair-work testing in mathematics
Eszter Bóra, Peter Juhasz
To cite this version:
Eszter Bóra, Peter Juhasz. Students’ attitudes and responses to pair-work testing in mathematics.
Eleventh Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education, Utrecht Univer- sity, Feb 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands. �hal-02430519�
Students' attitudes and responses to pair-work testing in mathematics
Eszter Bóra1 and Péter Juhász2
1Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary; eszterbora@gmail.com
2Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Hungary; juhasz.peter@renyi.mta.hu Keywords: Pair-work testing, 21th century skills.
Introduction
In Hungary, mathematics teachers usually teach every topic separately, one after the other. At the end of each topic the students write a test, these results are the main factors contributing to the final evaluation of a student work during the year. Other popular forms of assessments used daily are short oral individual assessments typically at the beginning of the class, short written tests (between 5-20 minutes) and checking the homework problems (OECD, 2015). There are several problems with these traditional tests taking practices.
First, the problem with the longer, end-of-topic tests are, that they can also contribute to the development of bad studying habits (e.g. last-minute studying, bad time-management), being these tests are often infrequent and their dates are known beforehand.
Second, in general, writing a test is not a perfect option for assess one’s understanding of a concept or level of mastery. Since a worrying number of students develop text anxiety over the years, and so, it is hard to tell how well they mastered the given topics. In Hungary there is a surprisingly high level of test anxiety among children (Bodas & Ollandick, 2005). For these reasons, we started to experiment with routines of testing with a novel approach. We want to encourage students to perceive testing situations more like an interesting challenge, as a part of the learning process. With a group of students, we tried pair-work tests. Our reasoning behind this idea is the following: if one of them run out of ideas, the other can help. If none of them has an idea, they can realize the problems are indeed hard and they can try to develop new ideas together. If they fail to solve a problem hopefully they will not attribute it to their own failure, lack of skills, because they see their pairs struggling with it as well. Thus it helps to develop a healthy attribution theory, or mindset to mathematics, and in general, to learning.
An additional factor encouraging us to experiment with this type of test is that collaborative skills are well sought after in the workplaces. Unsurprisingly, according to many researchers the necessary 21th century skills (Voogt, 2012) are: collaboration experience, critical thinking, problem-solving skills. Unfortunately, in Hungary the mathematical educational culture is only started to develop and practice more group working, cooperative techniques in a wider context (Andrews, 2003). So, we think it is important to develop, adopt these cooperative techniques in our local contexts as well.
The novelty of our work is to examine collaboration in a testing scenario in Hungarian mathematics education.
Our study
In our current pilot study there were four tests: twice students were tested in pairs and twice students were tested individually. We recorded the marks and overall performance of two-two sets of each type of tests. The tests had the same format and length, similar difficulties and recurring topics.
The pairs were randomly selected for the pair-work tests. They did not know beforehand who their partner will be for the test. If the number of students was odd, then the first step was to know which students is willing to work alone.
After the pair-work tests we conducted an online questionnaire. Where we asked the following five questions. What percentage of the test was your contribution? How do you like the concept of writing tests in pair? How would you rate your experience during the test? How did you like your pair before the test? How did you like your pair after the test?
We made an unstructured interview with the teacher about his observations during the test, and about his opinion about the possible long-term impacts of the paired testings.
What are the students’ attitudes to paired testing? We can assume from the result of the questionnaire that most student perceived the test as a fair one. We can also assume more confidently, that students have a positive attitude towards paired testing: they rated positively the concept, and they also rated their testing experience positively, despite, as in some cases, their initial not so positive attitude to their partners.
How did students respond to paired testing? Their attitudes towards each other improved. The overall level of paired work was high, the style of writing had more clarity than solo work.
According to the teacher’s interview, in general, students collaborated intensely but quietly, not disturbing each other.
Given the small sample size and time-frame, further research is needed to determine how paired testing improve collaboration and mastery of skills.
References
Andrews, P. (2003). Opportunities to learn in the Budapest mathematics classroom. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 1(2), 201-225.
Bodas, J., & Ollendick, T. H. (2005). Test anxiety: A cross-cultural perspective. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 8(1), 65-88.
OECD (2015). Education Policy Outlook: Hungary. Retrived from:
www.oecd.org/education/policyoutlook.htm
Teppo, A. R. (2015). Grounded theory methods. In A. Bikner-Ahsbahs, C. Knipping, & N. C.
Presmeg (Eds.), Approaches to qualitative research in mathematics education (pp. 3-21). Springer, Dordrecht.
Voogt, J., & Roblin, N. P. (2012). A comparative analysis of international frameworks for 21st century competences: Implications for national curriculum policies. Journal of curriculum studies, 44(3), 299-321.
