Instructions, Feedback and Grades: Problems of Assessment in Primary School Classrooms in Latin America.

Abstract

Abstract. This article is aimed at discussing three central aspects in the assessment practice into the classroom: a) the instructions proposed by teachers to students for assessing their learning; b) the kind of feedback that they give to their students; and, c) the use of grades. The discussion is based, on the one hand, on the study of literature on the subject and, on the other hand, on a large bank of information collected within the framework of a research done in classrooms of 6th grade of Primary School in eight Latin American countries. The purpose of the article is to illustrate, with empirical evidence, three main problems in the assessment practices: the decontextualized and purely school nature of the assessment activities, the lack of feedbacks of educative nature, and the arbitrariness and lack of meaning of grades.