TEACHER PERCEPTIONS ON LEARNING ASSESSMENT: UNDERSTANDING, FUNCTION, AND MOMENT

Abstract

This article aims to present some reflections on teacher perceptions on learning assessment. An open-ended survey with 10 questions was sent to four public-school teachers in Belo Horizonte/MG, aimed to identify the general aspects on the comprehension, the occurrence, the function, the moment, the manners, the resources/assessment instruments, the reasons, the results, the challenges, and the presence of assessment in the participants' pedagogic practices. Furthermore, considering the items comprehension, function, and moment, we aimed to correlate the teacher-participants' perceptions among them and with the reflections in authors such as Luckesi (2000, 2005), Melo e Bastos (2012), Mizukami (1986), Moreto (2010), Pinto (2016), Gagné (1975), Freire (1982, 1987, 1996), Lave (2013), Santos (2005), Soares da Silva (2021), Perrenoud (1998), and others. In general, even though there is conceptual diversity perceived in the participants' perceptions, the research data reveal that the teacher’s assessment conceptions can be organized into two main groups: essential, and functional assessment conceptions, in which both are constituted as antitheses of each other. In addition, highlights the fact that assessing learning is different than assessing the person in/of learning, once that, in the first case, it seeks comprehend the whole teaching-learning process, recognizing the actors, the pedagogic practice and the didactics-related-situations that guides the pedagogic work. In other way, assessing the person in/of learning goes back to the idea that learning is cumulative and transferable, from teacher to student, in addition to blaming the learner for his “failure in the learning situations.