Attitudes and beliefs of math teachers that make use of INVALSI items while implementing teaching for competences. An exploratory study in Italian primary schools

A teacher who is teaching for competences will require “good problems,” i.e. problems which are meaningful, comprehensible, authentic and inclusive (Di Martino, 2017). In this work we plan to investigate the characteristics of teachers using INVALSI tests in such a fashion. The work is part of a interdisciplinary research project (“Gruppo INVALSI – Didattica e saperi disciplinari”) led by experts both from Mathematics Education and from Pedagogy, based on a questionnaire with the goal of inquiring the relationship between the teaching practice of Italian fifth year Mathematics primary school teachers and their attitudes with respect INVALSI tests (Arzarello and Ferretti, in press; Faggiano, Monaco, Rizzo, Vaccaro, in press). There are three parts in the questionnaire: A first one about Math Education (the way teachers interpret INVALSI tests and their results); A second one about aspects of general education (which beliefs and attitudes do teachers hold, and how they affect teaching practices); A third one that collects personal data and context information. An analysis of this third section answers (N=526) given by teachers allows us to characterize the sample: 68% of the teachers was invited to fill in the questionnaire by their headmaster; 71% teaches in Piedmont or in Emilia–Romagna (two Northern regions that together represent 15% of Italian population); 90% hold permanent position. Even if such a large sample is not statistically representative, data is enough to offer many pieces of information to further reflections. Among the sets of questions of the questionnaire on teaching practices, one showed greater promise for data analysis: factor analysis allowed us to identify two factors that describe two different teacher attitudes on teaching for competences and using INVALSI tests with this goal. In order to investigate the relationship between teacher beliefs and attitudes and this teaching methodology, hence, we applied a linear regression. This allowed us to identify three indices with the best fitting for the model amongst all different teacher attitudes appearing in the questionnaire. The three indices identify a teacher that is: involved with valuation at different levels (member of leadership team, participation to training in service, professional and scientific debate), that utilizes formative assessment, that believes in the usefulness of INVALSI tests to analyse, reflect on, and design the teaching experience. Although the analyses conducted so far produced interesting results, further qualitative in-depth studies have been designed in order to confirm the results we investigated.