Classroom assessment for teacher change: A preliminary survey of teacher perception, beliefs, and practices in Ghana

This paper reports on a questionnaire based exploratory study of teacher perception, beliefs and current assessment practices with regard to the implementation of a curriculum reform ‘policy statement’, School-Based-Assessment (SBA), in Senior High School Mathematics classrooms in Ghana. The objective of the study was to inform the theory and design of professional development programme for teachers in an on-going formative assessment project in line with the SBA. A twenty-one self-designed items questionnaire having face and content validity covered teachers’ beliefs, perceptions, and current classroom assessment practices. By a multi-stage convenient sampling, 126 teachers were recruited out of which 77 successfully completed the study. By descriptive statistical analysis, the study established evidence that mathematics classrooms are currently mainly dominated by high-flying summative and ‘shadow’ formative assessments as a link to the nationwide external examination. Hence, there is a strong need for teachers to undertake a professional development in formative assessment so that they might be very effective in the SBA.