Abstract
Abstract : Written assessment tasks in foundation phase (FP) classrooms are one of the tools intended to assess whether learners make sense of curriculum content taught to them. The ultimate aim of these tasks should be assessment for learning (AfL), which focuses on supporting learning rather than on judging achievement (Harrison, 2015, p. 78). In contrast to AfL, national survey tests, the former South African Annual National Assessment (ANA) emphasizes procedural content, with the aim of producing results. In this manner, conceptual learning is relegated to the back end of the assessment process. In this study, I posit that many forms of assessment in the FP still lack the purposeful design processes needed to optimally assess learners’ number concepts (curriculum) and conceptual development (based on ideas from cognitive psychology). The primary purpose of this study is to design an assessment tool embedded in school curriculum content and early childhood conceptual development theory. To this purpose, the study involves the assessment of grade 3 children’s mathematical conceptual development (using a hierarchical theoretical model of young children’s maths development) by means of a test based on the national grade 3 Mathematics curriculum content. I thus approached the study with the central research question, “How will grade 3 learners perform on a custom designed, curriculum-based test?” The study uses a designed-based research (DBR) framework. Data were collected in two iterative cycles. The first cycle focused on designing an assessment tool through the formulation of a pool of possible test items based on grade 3 curriculum content in the content area, ‘Numbers, operations and relationships’, utilising principles from a hierarchical model of young children’s Mathematics development, known as the Fritz Model, a model grounded in cognitive theory (Fritz, Ricken & Balzer, 2009) and named after one of its original designers, Annemarie Fritz. These potential test items were then presented to a panel of experts tasked to select 47 suitable items for the final assessment tool. The second cycle was devoted to the piloting of the test, which was aimed at assessing the mathematical development of a purposively selected sample of grade 3 learners...
M.Ed. (Educational Psychology)