Teachers and standardized assessments in mathematics: an affective perspective

Standardized assessments in mathematics have an increasing relevance in the educational debate and, often, they heavily affect educational policies. Specifically, the framework and the items of standardized assessments suggest what is considered relevant as an outcome of mathematics education at a certain school level. The strength and the quality of the educational impact of standardized assessments seem to depend heavily on teachers’ affective reactions to standardized assessment; however, studies focused on this issue are very rare: what are teachers’ attitudes towards the standardized assessments and their effects? In this frame, we carried out a large qualitative research to investigate teachers’ attitudes in the Italian context.